KNOWING by Alex Proyas
Fifty years ago, a time-capsule was buried at a school in Massachusettes. The children have drawn pictures of their visions of the future. But one of the envelopes does not contain a drawing – strange girl Lucinda Embry’s (Lara Robinson) message to the future is a piece of paper covered with numbers. The receiver is Caleb Koestler (Chandler Canterbury) who lives with his father John (Nicolas Cage), a widower and professor of astrophysics. While Caleb begins to hear voices and to see strange pale men in the woods, John – under the influence of more than one shot of whisky – discovers that the numbers on Lucinda’s piece of paper are not meaningless. It seems that all the major disasters of the last 50 years are hidden in the numbers – complete with date and number of victims. Together with Lucinda’s daughter, Diana Wayland (Rose Byrne), and her daughter Abby he tries to find out what is the meaning of Lucinda’s message.
When mysteries are to be solved in ridiculous ways, Nicolages Cage is the go-to guy (also see National Treasure , National Treasure 2: Book of Secrets). Nobody does it like Nicolas Cage – looking confused and despaired and giving the audience the feeling it is not because of the plot holes or the funny dialogue but because of the mystifying riddles only Nic can solve and the shocking secrets he discovers.
There are some quite good bits in Knowing like the sinister pale men and some disaster scenes, but beware of the gaping plot holes and the ending that might induce hyperglycemia because it is so sickly sweet.
A lot of fuss has been made about the supposed Christian symbolism, and yes, there is plenty of that (take note, Roger Ebert, i did see the wings!), but actually, Knowing seems less like blatant Christian propaganda than like an advert of those loonies who congregate on abandoned farms in California when a comet appears because they expect the world to end and angels/aliens to save them Chosen Ones and take them to the Heavens in their UFO. They better take all copies of this movie with them and never return.
It’s really about time for Nicolas Cage to try appearing in a film with a decent script.
Knowing Movie Trailer