Fifty years ago, a young girl writes a series of seemingly random numerals in a letter that is placed in a time capsule… Fifty years on, that letter lands in the hands of a young boy, whose scientist father tries to make sense of it all. Chaos and creepiness ensue.
Nicolas Cage plays, well, himself. I forget the character’s name but really, it’s hardly relevant. I am a fan of Cage but the increasing levels of tripe he chooses to associate himself with these days is starting to put me off, particularly in consideration of the fact that he really only has one dimension: the slightly disaffected, solitary maverick, punctuated with a varying degree of swashbuckle and the odd dash of eccentricity. Sadly in Knowing, the swashbuckling eccentric gives way to the dourest version of Cage’s perma-character since The Family Man. Even the action sequences, although few and far between, seem tame and lacklustre in comparison to his usual exuberance (for example in the enormously fun albeit preposterous National Treasure series).
He does a solid enough job though, and the supporting cast, although not stand-out, are fairly inoffensive, particularly the children who surprisingly fail to annoy me. The problem isn’t the acting performances, but the plot. It starts out with a decent concept, and the first half of the movie is actually quite good, creating an eerie atmosphere and working the viewer into a state of cold anticipation using the usual horror techniques expertly. However, from a typical horror/chiller opening and mid-section (think The Sixth Sense or Signs) the screenwriter appears to have had some kind of schizophrenic episode, as the plot takes a turn for the ridiculous, and veers wildly from genre to genre, threatening for a while to become a fully-fledged disaster movie, before culminating in a truly cringe-worthy sci-fi style ending that screamed Scientology from every crappy CGI-filled orifice. As is often the case with these types of movies, the ‘big reveal’ is a let-down of epic proportions in a plethora of ways, not least that the so-called aliens are basically just Bros with black cloaks. And slightly more colour in their cheeks.
As is my wont, I found myself second-guessing the ending fairly early on and I’m quite confident that I came up with a much better one in my head in about two minutes. In actual fact, I feel that we were set up for a completely different (and undoubtedly better) movie to the one we actually ended up with, quite apart from the laughably twee ending. After the exposition, the first major scene with Cage lecturing to his class about randomness versus determinism to me seems to be hinting at an interesting and thought-provoking concept, that a decent scriptwriter would have rode with, instead of becoming distracted by the seemingly persistent notion that in Hollywood in the present day you cannot make a dime of profit without throwing aliens at a story. We could have ended up with a more cerebral version of the Final Destination theory (death has a plan) but instead, well, you know the rest (I scratched it into the desk with my nails because the alien-stroke-angels told me to).
I could make a comprehensive list of ‘stuff that didn’t make sense’ but I am holding myself back as I often tell others to ‘suspend reality’ and just enjoy a film experience, however far-fetched, and I don’t want to be accused of being hypocritical. But I will just say one thing – the black pebbles – just WHY?
Nicolas Cage plays, well, himself. I forget the character’s name but really, it’s hardly relevant. I am a fan of Cage but the increasing levels of tripe he chooses to associate himself with these days is starting to put me off, particularly in consideration of the fact that he really only has one dimension: the slightly disaffected, solitary maverick, punctuated with a varying degree of swashbuckle and the odd dash of eccentricity. Sadly in Knowing, the swashbuckling eccentric gives way to the dourest version of Cage’s perma-character since The Family Man. Even the action sequences, although few and far between, seem tame and lacklustre in comparison to his usual exuberance (for example in the enormously fun albeit preposterous National Treasure series).
He does a solid enough job though, and the supporting cast, although not stand-out, are fairly inoffensive, particularly the children who surprisingly fail to annoy me. The problem isn’t the acting performances, but the plot. It starts out with a decent concept, and the first half of the movie is actually quite good, creating an eerie atmosphere and working the viewer into a state of cold anticipation using the usual horror techniques expertly. However, from a typical horror/chiller opening and mid-section (think The Sixth Sense or Signs) the screenwriter appears to have had some kind of schizophrenic episode, as the plot takes a turn for the ridiculous, and veers wildly from genre to genre, threatening for a while to become a fully-fledged disaster movie, before culminating in a truly cringe-worthy sci-fi style ending that screamed Scientology from every crappy CGI-filled orifice. As is often the case with these types of movies, the ‘big reveal’ is a let-down of epic proportions in a plethora of ways, not least that the so-called aliens are basically just Bros with black cloaks. And slightly more colour in their cheeks.
As is my wont, I found myself second-guessing the ending fairly early on and I’m quite confident that I came up with a much better one in my head in about two minutes. In actual fact, I feel that we were set up for a completely different (and undoubtedly better) movie to the one we actually ended up with, quite apart from the laughably twee ending. After the exposition, the first major scene with Cage lecturing to his class about randomness versus determinism to me seems to be hinting at an interesting and thought-provoking concept, that a decent scriptwriter would have rode with, instead of becoming distracted by the seemingly persistent notion that in Hollywood in the present day you cannot make a dime of profit without throwing aliens at a story. We could have ended up with a more cerebral version of the Final Destination theory (death has a plan) but instead, well, you know the rest (I scratched it into the desk with my nails because the alien-stroke-angels told me to).
I could make a comprehensive list of ‘stuff that didn’t make sense’ but I am holding myself back as I often tell others to ‘suspend reality’ and just enjoy a film experience, however far-fetched, and I don’t want to be accused of being hypocritical. But I will just say one thing – the black pebbles – just WHY?
Verdict - never has a well constructed concept dissolved so rapidly into rank mediocrity - 5.5/10
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