Knowing
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DVD details
Actor: Nicolas Cage, Rose ByrneBrand: CAGE,NICOLAS
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Subtitled); Spanish (Subtitled); English (Original Language); Spanish (Dubbed)
Format: AC-3, Color, Dolby, Dubbed, DVD, NTSC, Subtitled, Widescreen
Picture Format: 2.35:1
Running Time: 121 minutes
Published: 2009-07-01
DVD Release Date: 2009-07-07
Audience Rating: PG-13 (Parental Guidance Suggested)
Studio: Summit Entertainment
DVD Reviews of Knowing
DVD Review: Knowing how NOT to make a movie READ THIS ONE FIRST BEFORE THE OTHER FIRSTS!
Summary: 1 Stars
I was honestly very hopeful that when I bought Knowing (after waiting for the price to drop) that it might be a movie I could watch more than once and enjoy. Not even close. Not because it had that 6th Sense kind of quality where once you know the ending you can't really get into it. This simply was a blandly written and poorly directed movie where Nicholas Cage was not at his best. In fact, his timing and mechanics were way off and it looked as if the director was afraid to direct him. Cage's character never really becomes anyone worth relating to. No flashbacks, boring or absent dialog, no personality, no supporting characters with any character, even his son is as boring as dirt. The best actors were the ones in the beginning before the marque actors showed up. You can blame the writers for the poor character development but also Cage looked as if he mailed it in, which for him is still pretty passable, but Cage could only handle the basics and many of his motions looked telegraphed. That took us out of the movie a few times but was forgivable. What was really poor were the missed opportunities this movie presented coupled with the far reaching stupidity of the overall plot once you knew where it was going. I even held out hope for a long time that it wouldn't go where I worried it was going but at every turn it continued to go straight ahead into oblivion. It didn't help that everything up to the ending was completely superfluous to the ending.
PLOT WARNING: The beginning started out promising. We had children making pictures for a school time capsule but one child seems disturbed and makes a list of numbers. All the pictures are placed in the capsule. Fifty years later in the present time the capsule is open and Cage's son gets the letter with the strange list of numbers. After some boring dialog and a very sloppy and poorly choreographed spill of Cage's drink on the paper, Cage becomes interested in the list of numbers. He quickly deduces their meaning despite having no clear epiphany moment and never bringing us on the journey of his mind. He simply figures it out. It's a list of tragedies that have all come true except the few set for the next few days. Better directing, a few more scenes and deeper dialog could have made this part a great part of the movie. MISSED. They could have made the discovery enjoyable but they seemed too hurried to present what came next. NOTHING. Sure there are plane crashes and mysterious visitors but the director found every way possible to strain the suspense out all of it, mostly by never building the characters or adding the necessary dialog to connect them or make them interesting. The same held true for the plot where we had a lot of intriguing events that were never logically threaded together. It was looking like another Wicker Man as you finally realize that the ending was going to make the journey a waste. And it was a waste. Cage goes off following the path of destruction stopping nothing and saving no one during what should have been a series of very suspenseful events. The director missed a ton of opportunities to make this a real thriller but at the end of this tail-chasing exercise Cage discovers that these predictions can't be stopped and no one can be saved. These silly stones appear which turn out to mean nothing. The visitors show up at times to take the children and could but don't and instead haunt them with voices and visions and possession. The predictions come true and the last one predicts the end of the world. Another unexplainable epiphany leads Cage to discover the cause which is a solar flare. No stopping that so we realize the world is going to end. For some unknown reason Cage knows that the government will tell everyone and for some stupid reason the government does. Then the movie really goes flat as Cage again chases his tail and has another unexplained epiphany sending Cage to find some missing numbers that return him to a location where the visitors would leave from. The writers then unnecessarily kill off the one supporting actress that was building some character. Cage watches her die then catches up to the visitors using the numbers. The kids writing the numbers never needed them since the visitors were simply going up to the kids wherever they were and the kids did not know what the numbers meant anyways. The numbers didn't help Cage since everything still came true and Cage was not allowed to go on the spaceship since he was not called by these very selective visitors. Cage arrives in time to say goodbye and watch the aliens take his kid along with his now dead friend's kid to a new world with a bunch of other kids and animals in ships in a Noah's Ark type of event. A not so tearful goodbye as the heartless aliens won't take Cage and then they are off. Cage returns home to his estranged family who are estranged for no reason. The predictions served absolutely no purpose in the movie since the kids did not know of them and the predictions did not lead to anything positive. The visitors take the kids and the reason for the predictions? They simply come true. Cage's son actually has to say the prediction were meant to prepare them in some way just to give these useless predictions meaning to the movie goer which of course if you have to say it then it did not. Why are the last three tragedies centered around Cage's character anyways when there were ships leaving from all over the Earth supposedly with other kids? The predictions from the aliens are meant to be intriguing but again have no affect on the outcome. In the end Cage's son goes off to a new world where they have tall grass and a big tree of life in the center which I guess was meant to give us an Adam and Eve feel. The Earth is then engulfed by a solar flare with some nice effects that came way too late.
I could have given this movie two stars but this movie should have been a 4 or 5 so they are losing a star for screwing up a free lunch. They had opportunity all over the place. Let Cage save the world! Let him struggle a little more to figure things out then let it mean something. Make the death toll numbers a little off to account for human error vs alien exactness. Make the predictions important to the outcome and when Cage figure's it out let him make SOME difference. Let Cage take over an alien ship. Anything but a list of unchangeable predictions provided by a group of antisocial aliens for absolutely no reason except there is a movie audience. I settle for slapping Cage's agent for going from Adaptation to Weather Man to Wicker Man to Ghost Rider to this. There is a disturbing trend to Cage's selections as he has gone from stretching himself with fringe and unpopular roles with descent actors like Adaptation and The Weather Man to unfinished plots with unsatisfying endings. Now I need to find another movie to satisfy my Sci-fi fix and Cage is left to fix his finances and decide if he wants to make a movie worth watching ever again.
UPDATE: I gave this movie away last year. Never missed it. After reading these reviews, I am tempted to watch it again with a 10-car-pile-up kind of intrigue, but when I flash back to some of the scenes I quickly remember why I gave it away. Thank God it's not in my collection. Watching this film again would lead me to bleed from my eye sockets. As I read the phoney 5-star reviews I recognize there is a real effort to maintain the ratings by publicists but if you can avoid the pain of watching this despite the Sci-fi label and the lack of any good Sci-fi out there, then you will not have the horrific memories of this movie I have. Can I sue the director pain & suffering? I'd sue Cage but he has money issues.
Description of Knowing
Genre: Action/Adventure
Rating: PG13
Release Date: 7-JUL-2009
Media Type: DVD
Nicolas Cage stars in this largely unsatisfying science-fiction tale that begins as a taut and spooky story concerning psychic legacies and ends up falling back on Steven Spielberg's old, cosmic playbook for default explanations about weird phenomena. Cage stars as astrophysicist and widower John Koestler, whose young son attends a school where a 50-year-old time capsule is dug up and opened. Koestler's son, Caleb (Chandler Canterbury), is given an envelope from the capsule containing a sheet of paper inscribed with seemingly-random numbers. Koestler interprets groupings of the numbers as prophesies (made in 1959) of disasters leading up to a globally catastrophic event late in 2009. Moreover, some of the later tragedies involve him or members of his family, suggesting the paper was meant to fall into his and Caleb's hands. That?s not the only freaky thing drawing father and son in a direction they really don't want to go. Among other things, a quartet of mute strangers keeps showing up with a powerful interest in Caleb's whereabouts, and the daughter and granddaughter of the little girl who originally scribbled those numbers in 1959 are under the shadow of a separate prediction of doom. Everything goes swimmingly until it's time for director Alex Proyas (The Crow) to begin tying up all the strings, and cliches start falling like rain. On the plus side, Knowing includes a couple of breathtaking scenes of calamity, the most horrifying (and realistic) of which is a jet crash the likes of which has never been committed to film. --Tom Keogh
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