What made me slightly curious about Knowing, which in its trailer looked like just another silly sci-fi movie, was Roger Ebert's review, in which he says that it's "among the best science-fiction films I've seen -- frightening, suspenseful, intelligent and, when it needs to be, rather awesome." He explains that the film concerns "the most fundamental of all philosophical debates: Is the universe deterministic or random? Is everything in some way preordained or does it happen by chance?"
Of course, Ebert likes everything, but I'd also heard good things over the years about Knowing's director, Alex Proyas, whose The Crow and Dark City are well-regarded. I'd seen only Proyas's least acclaimed film, I, Robot, and had mostly enjoyed it. I decided to give Knowing a shot and to add The Crow and Dark City to my Netflix queue.
As it turns out, Knowing is just another silly sci-fi movie, using philosophical questions only as a springboard for sensationalistic special effects, but after a while it begins to believe too much in its puffed-up exterior, leaving behind the modest thriller that functioned comparatively well and finishing with a nutty grandiosity for which I can't, at the moment, summon a comparison. Before that, however, Knowing is quite watchable, proceeding with a nervous, humorless intensity that is sometimes laughable but is engaging enough, sort of like The Butterfly Effect -- so earnestly absorbed in its geeky stupidity that we become absorbed too. Science fiction's self-seriousness, its way of behaving as if its harebrained notions were not merely thought-provoking but rather earth-shattering, can be charming, and I occasionally find myself willing to play along -- just not to the lengths Knowing requests. On some level, the director has to recognize that it's just a foolish entertainment. Here, Alex Proyas, channeling M. Night Shyamalan to some extent, forgets.
Knowing opens in Lexington, Massachusetts in 1959, when a teacher at an elementary school asks her students to draw pictures of what they think the world will look like in 50 years. Most draw spaceships and robots, but one girl, Lucinda, offers only a long string of numbers. The teacher collects the papers, which are then sealed in a time capsule and buried outside the school.
In 2009, the time capsule is opened, and the drawings are passed out to the school's new students. Caleb (Chandler Canterbury), the precocious son of MIT professor John Koestler (Nicolas Cage), receives Lucinda's cryptic prophecy and brings it home. John studies it and realizes that Lucinda's numbers are dates. She has predicted every major disaster that has occurred over the past half century. A few dates still remain. One of them, John deduces, foretells the apocalypse. Naturally, this will also affect Lucinda's daughter (Rose Byrne) and granddaughter (Lara Robinson).
The way in which Knowing is most effective is rather shameful. It does a better job of playing upon our fears of vehicular accidents than any other movie I've seen. Here, we get a plane crash, a derailed subway train, and an automobile collison -- all very deadly. The craft displayed in rendering these catastrophes is estimable, and the results are highly gripping. I felt a faint video-game quality impinging on the intended realism, but all three sequences are stunningly vivid nonetheless -- reminiscent, to me, of Saving Private Ryan's battle scenes. The grisly plane crash, which includes an elaborate long take featuring a great deal of smoke, screaming, chaos, and explosions, is the most ambitious of them and, in its vaguely dishonorable fashion, the most impressive.
The rest of the movie is not as frightening. At times, it verges on real suspense, but then a ham-fisted, B-movie ridiculousness creeps up, and the grimness turns into comedy. Knowing is full of small but cumulatively fatal moments of ineptness. Take the early scene in John's classroom at MIT, with his overwhelmingly phony movie-teacher lesson that just happens to explain the film's main theme. Take John's trip to New York, when, driving from Massachusetts, he approaches Manhattan via the Brooklyn Bridge. Take every scene with the svelte, blond aliens, who skulk about with quiet purposelessness. Take the egregious product placement, which has an MIT professor inexplicably driving a large pickup truck -- an ever-present Ford F-150, photographed as if in a car commercial, gliding majestically down suburban boulevards and navigating off-road with catlike grace.
Take Nicolas Cage's performance in general. Cage strikes me as one of the strangest of all movie stars. He's often one of our very best actors (for example, in The Weather Man or Moonstruck); an unlikely action hero, though sometimes successful, as in The Rock; and, at other times, staggeringly ludicrous, with a comically focused ardor, a weird inability to control the volume of his voice, an unfortunate mixture of woodenness and volatility, and a sadly diverse array of hairpieces. Knowing is a repeat of The Wicker Man, with the same furrowed brow and bizarre outbursts. Nicolas Cage is sort of fun in this mode, actually, but I don't think it helps the movie, and it's tough to say why he keeps doing it.
Cage is, however, supposed to appear later this year in Werner Herzog's remake of Bad Lieutenant, set in New Orleans. That sounds pretty good. I don't know what Proyas will do next, but I'm a little less excited now to watch The Crow and Dark City.
