Movie Review : Knowing (2009)

•Genre: Drama, Suspense/Thriller
•Running Time: 122 min.
•Director: Alex Proyas
•Writer: Ryne Person, Richard Kelly, Juliet Snowden, Stiles White, Stuart Hazeldine, Alex Proyas
•Cast: Nicolas Cage, Rose Byrne, Chandler Canterbury, Ben Mendelsohn, Adrienne Pickering, Tamara Donnellan, Brett Robson, Jayson Sutcliffe

Synopsis

In 1958, as part of the dedication ceremony for a new elementary school, a group of students is asked to draw pictures to be stored in a time capsule. But one mysterious girl fills her sheet of paper with rows of apparently random numbers instead. Fifty years later, a new generation of students examines the capsule's contents and the girl's cryptic message ends up in the hands of young Caleb Koestler. But it is Caleb's father, professor John Koestler, who makes the startling discovery that the encoded message predicts with pinpoint accuracy the dates, death tolls and coordinates of every major disaster of the past 50 years. As John further unravels the document's chilling secrets, he realizes the document foretells three additional events-the last of which hints at destruction on a global scale and seems to somehow involve John and his son. When John's attempts to alert the authorities fall on deaf ears, he takes it upon himself to try to prevent more destruction from taking place. With the reluctant help of Diana Wayland and Abby Wayland, the daughter and granddaughter of the now-deceased author of the prophecies, John's increasingly desperate efforts take him on a heart-pounding race against time until he finds himself facing the ultimate disaster-and the ultimate sacrifice.

Movie Review

Knowing (2009)

Nicolas Cage as an astrophysicist trying to save the world in “Knowing,” directed by Alex Proyas.

Nobody requires plausibility from a movie like “Knowing,” which features slender blond aliens, intimations of apocalypse, clairvoyant children and Nicolas Cage as an astrophysicist. If the thing manages to avoid complete preposterousness, the audience can still have a good time.

Or maybe even if it doesn’t: the folks at a recent sneak preview of “Knowing,” directed by Alex Proyas (“Dark City,” “I, Robot”), seemed to be enjoying themselves, though it may have been at the movie’s expense. (Just as well, since they were seeing it free.) If your intention is to make a brooding, hauntingly allegorical terror-thriller, it’s probably not a good sign when spectacles of mass death and intimations of planetary destruction are met with hoots and giggles.

It’s safe to say that the crowd was laughing at Mr. Cage, rather than with him, since Mr. Cage rarely expresses mirth on screen. Instead, he favors a demented, compulsive intensity, which can sometimes be kind of fun, for example in the “National Treasure” movies. In “Knowing,” though, he seems to be exploring the rich vein of crazy he tapped in Neil LaBute’s train-wreck remake of “The Wicker Man.” Mr. Cage screams and yells and flails, smacks a tree with a baseball bat, waves a gun at a slender blond alien and barks “this is not a crank call” into a pay phone after calling in a breathless warning of a terrorist attack.

And why not? What would you do if you were an M.I.T. astrophysicist who discovered that the numbers written down 50 years earlier by a spooky schoolgirl and sealed in a time capsule were prophecies of subsequent catastrophes? You might also hit a tree with a Louisville Slugger and start ranting like a madman. But the odd thing about Mr. Cage in this movie is that even when he is responding to the threat of complete human extinction, you still can’t help feeling that he’s overreacting.

His character, John Koestler, is, like most movie dads these days, a widower, stricken with grief and trying to raise a cute, precocious young son (Chandler Canterbury). Once John starts running the numbers from the spooky girl’s spreadsheet, the tone of the movie switches from foreboding creepiness to apocalyptic hysteria, summed up less in the occasional explosion or transportation-related fireball than in Rose Byrne’s incessant shrieking. She plays Diana, daughter of the spooky schoolgirl (and mother of another one; both are played by Lara Robinson), and evolves from mysterious stranger to potential love interest to raving hysteric in record time.

Though not quickly enough. The draggy, lurching two hours of “Knowing” will make you long for the end of the world, even as you worry that there will not be time for all your questions to be answered. Who are those slender blond folk, called “the Whisper People” by John’s son and Diana’s daughter? Are they goth vampires who showed up early to audition for the “Twilight” sequel? Former members of Kraftwerk? Did they steal all those smooth black pebbles from a day spa after a hot stone massage? Is that why they seem so relaxed?

Actually, you will figure out who they are long before the astrophysicist does and stop caring long before that. “Knowing” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). Some mild swearing and lots of death.

Credit : MRQE SITE