Knowing (2009)

[Dave]

I watched this film starring Nicolas Cage, directed by Alex Proyas last night. I had higher expectations for it, after all this is the same director who gave us Dark City. It was great until the last half-hour when it still made little sense and became a weird mash-up of Larry Niven's Inconstant Moon, and the films Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Donnie Darko The Sixth Sense and any Roland Emmerich disaster movie you care to pick.

A teacher opens a time capsule that has been dug up at his son's elementary school; in it are some chilling predictions -- some that have already occurred and others that are about to -- that lead him to believe his family plays a role in the events that are about to unfold.

It was quite an effective thriller for the first two-thirds. The scientist who every one believes is crazy, the psychic girl who has made an accurate prophecy of future disasters. However, once the aliens were introduced (did no one else think evil monkey from Chris's cupboard in Family Guy?) then the previous events made no sense:
How do the aliens know the future anyway?
Why are they whispering warnings for 50 years; why not just take the children away earlier? What was the point of the warnings when nothing could be done to prevent it happening?
Why did Abbey die at midnight on the day her mother predicted her death? Everyone died that same day anyway, so, so what?
Why did the people on the dark side of the Earth die? If I got this right; a solar flare burned up the ozone layer; the lack of an ozone layer allowed cosmic rays to reach the Earth; the cosmic radiation set the atmosphere on fire??
Are the aliens really repopulating the world with only two children and two rabbits?
Or was there two children in every ship seen? Why couldn't they build bigger ships to take more children at once?
Where do those cornfields come from?
What was with the black stones?

The pseudo-science failed miserably. Many commentators seems to thing the special effects were wonderful, but both the aeroplane crash and the subway crash both seemed unreal to me; and quite obviously computer generated.

Then there was all the religious nonsense. His agony over whether life is predetermined or chaotic. Not speaking to his father because he is a scientist and his father is a preacher.

 

[Ursa major]

Thanks for this, Dave. Now I don't regret not watching it. (Not that I was regretting it much.)

 

[Metryq]

Like Ridley Scott, Proyas delivers atmosphere, but don't expect logic. In Dark City we have these creepy characters in derby hats who can "tune"—telekinetically alter the artificial world everyone lives in—yet they come after the hero with knives? Considering the amount of control the aliens had over their "rat maze," the whole experiment of the Dark City made no sense at all.

The bit in I, Robot about Sonny having two brains made no sense at all. Dr. Calvin explained that Sonny had two brains—one with the Three Laws, one without. So he could "choose" whether or not to follow the Laws. One of the brains would have to be dominant, which would decide Sonny's behavior. Caliban, the robot novel I believe the movie was based on, is very similar: a massive roll-out of New Law robots for a special project, and an overall theme of the Three Laws actually being harmful to humanity. Caliban was an experimental No Law robot meant only for the laboratory. But back to the movie—Sonny is to be "decommissioned" for his involvement in Dr. Lanning's death. Nanites designed to destroy positronic neurons are to be injected into his brain. Dr. Calvin opts to "decommission" a similar model robot and say it was Sonny. What—like these fancy robots don't have serial numbers? Besides, if Sonny had two brains, why all the fuss about decommissioning his standard issue Three Law brain?

I completely agree with Dave's assessment of Knowing, which exhausts all the Alex Proyas films I've seen.

 

[TheTomG]

Yeah it started out fun and then totally ruined itself with its ending. It was SO disappointing when, ta da, "It's aliens!"

I hate that as much as I hate "It was all only a dream...."

 

[Tecdavid]

I wasn't a fan of this film, either. Up until the end, it seemed pretty decent, with a great air of mystery going on, but then it just... gave up! It was bad enough that it decided that aliens would once again be the source of a story's puzzle, but what really ruined it for me was how nilhistic the ending was. Really, the ending's unavoidable catastrophe begged the question "What was the point of sitting us down, giving us this mystery, watching the hero pursue it, only to learn he couldn't do a thing to stop the distaster it pointed to?"

 

[Moonbat]

I finally got round to watching this last week. I thought it started really well, the little girl was quite freaky, almost like a cliche horror movie child. The aliens (before we knew they were aliens) were quite scary as well.

I did like the two big crash scenes, I thought they were quite well done, not so much in realistic terms, but they showed some deaths; people burning and screaming, and people being hit by the tube (viewed from inside the train) with a sort of emotionless indefference, kind of like real life. (incedentally he (Nicholas 'I've got less hair than I'd like to admit' Cage) tells the woman with the baby to get off the train/tube but if she had she would have sirely been killed, so it was a good job she ignored him, except then he saved her)
When he and the woman are at the old house in the woods and they read EVERYONE ELSE under the bed, it was quite good,

But then it was rubbish, it got a bit silly when he suddenly thought, I know maybe it is the sun. Then checks some old work of his and goes, oh yeah, it's the sun, we're all going to die. A lot of silly stuff, I kind of hoped the aliens were angels when the ship turned up, but they were made to look angelic as they ascended into thier craft.

So many good points made by Dave, I could add some more, like why did only a handful of stones raise into the air when he was in that field surrounded by them?
Maybe all the stones suggests that there were loads of children taken over the years?
What was going on with the aliens, and the rabbits!!! The rabbits, for crying out loud! why did they give the kids rabbits, was it a metaphor for how they want the kids to breed?
Also, on the new planet, how are the children going to survive, if they didn't take any adults, what happened to the accumilated knowledge of mankind?
It's a shame they had to explain everything and thought the best way to do it was 'aliens' when it could have been so much more.

 

[Anthony G Williams]

My take on it, from my SFF blog: Science Fiction & Fantasy


This one had passed me by until now, and I knew nothing about it before watching. Be warned – there are some spoilers in this review since it's difficult to write about the film without them, but I'll try to keep them to a minimum.

The plot concerns the opening of a "time vault" buried at a school fifty years before, which had been filled with examples of the children's work. One of the envelopes turns out to contain a page of numbers in apparently random order. Professor John Koestler (Nicholas Cage), the scientist father of one of the present-day children, first becomes intrigued by what the numbers might mean then increasingly horrified as he realises that they seem to foretell major disasters – decades before they happened.

He tries to discover the origin of the paper and tracks down Diana Wayland (Rose Byrne), the daughter of the girl who wrote the paper and now, like Koestler, the single parent of a young child. Meanwhile his son begins to hear strange voices in his head, inhuman-looking men begin to watch their house, and Koestler becomes increasingly desperate in his attempts to discover what is going on. I am not a fan of Nicholas Cage, but in this film he is well suited to the permanent state of agonised bewilderment his face seems to have been designed for.

The first part of most stories tends to set expectations in terms of how the plot is going to develop. I assumed that the two leads would get together, resolve what is going on, and all live happily ever after. What actually happens is far more surprising and intriguing than that. The story veers off in an unexpected direction in the final scenes, shifting from fantasy to science fiction.

These days the description "adult movie" is taken to mean explicit sex and and nudity, but there is none of those in this film. Instead, it is adult in a different way, in that it follows the plot through with a ruthless logic that is decidedly untypical of Hollywood. On the way, it includes some of the most frighteningly realistic crash sequences I have ever seen. The story reminded me of a novel I reviewed here in March 2010, Library of the Dead by Glenn Cooper, and it has an equally dramatic and unexpected ending. The only problem with the SF ending is that in retrospect it sits rather uncomfortably with the fantasy beginning. Despite this, Knowing is a film that is worth watching.

 

[Phyrebrat]

I quite enjoyed the movie despite the fact that I find it hard to see Nicholas Cage for that length of time…

The enduring thought I came out with was that they were heavily influenced by Ezekiel’s vision in Ezekiel 1 in the King James version.

Ezekiel 1 NKJV - Ezekiel

You may want to search for images rather than read the scripture to make a comparison, as there have been plenty of artistic renderings of it.

pH