Movie Review "Knowing"

"Knowing," with Nicolas Cage


The concept is pretty simple. A girl who looks just like the girl from the Exorcist writes down a series of random numbers for a time capsule project in 1959. But the teacher grabs it from her before she finishes. Then the time capsule is buried, and the girl disappears. The teacher finds her later in a closet, with some numbers scratched in the door, her fingers bloody and creepy. Then you see Nicolas Cage and his Discovery Channel obsessed dork son. They have the usual widower-kid banter. Then Nick Cage's son gets the same paper that the girl from the 50s wrote for the time capsule when it's unearthed 50 years later. Then the son, who has a hearing aid, suddenly gets ovices in his head. The rest is Nick Cage, whose character is a college professor who has been an atheist since his wife was killed and has a bad haircut and a drinking problem, try to stop the numbers (which is a code predicting correctly every major disaster from 1959 to this year).

This film switches tracks a lot. It is drama one point, thriller the next, action the next, then horror, then sci-fi, all in a mixed up order. You're going to see a plane narrowly miss Cage, then see black oval-shaped rocks hover around him later. Cars get hit by trucks, people die, kids are kidnapped. It does explain why Nick Cage's character of all people is the guy whose kid finds the paper. He explains in a class to his students about how one theory of how life is the way it is is how it's destined to happen (a very religious thought). So because it was destined to happen, Nick Cage is chosen to save the world. Which he doesn't.

The ending suggests that everything that Nick Cage did was all for nothing. It literally is a bad ending. Because the sun shoots out a solar flare that reaches Earth and destroys us all. Because there are black-clothed pale blond guys stalking Nick Cage's kid. Because those same weird blond guys are actually aliens (no I'm not kidding, they make the blue guy from "Watchmen" look normal), because they take Nick Cage's son and the granddaughter of the woman who wrote the paper (and two of every other animal, a la Noah's Ark), and then they leave in weird blue spaceships, leaving everyone else to die, including Nick Cage. Then it gets worse. The very last minute shows the kids on an alien planet, the aliens dropping off all the animals, then they run off towards a funny looking fruit tree. And you have to be a total idiot to realize what that tree is. That's right, they run off to eat an alien version of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil (from the Bible). Then as they're about to reach the tree, the screen goes black. Roll end credits.

Oh, yeah, it's also an action movie.

Score: 5/10