Blog Review: Knowing

Directed by: Alex Proyas

Written by: Ryne Douglas Pearson

Produced by: David Alper, David J. Bloomfield

Starring: Nicholas Cage, Chandler Canterbury, Rose Byrne

Unabashedly predictable, Knowing casts a famous actor (Nicholas Cage) throws a few curveballs scenes, and wraps it all up with nice Christian overtones. Mirroring the trademark crises of faith which made M. Night Shymalan immensely popular, director Alex Proyas both tries and fails miserably at combining themes of Christian morality and Shymalan suspense into one feature length film. In short, the film was one really long version of the biblical version of Armageddon.  

The movie is generally straightforward, a grouchy MIT professor (Nicholas Cage) prone to alcohol driven fits of hysteria and outbursts of atheism, changes once his mewling young son (Chandler Canterbury) comes into possession of a handwritten scrawl of numbers—a 50-year-old single-spaced page full of digits that just so happens to provide dates, times, latitudes and longitudes for every natural or man-made catastrophe— including the forthcoming Armageddon. As the storyline progresses, more characters are slowly introduced and soon it becomes clear that Armageddon is something much more than simply a “natural” event. In fact, there’s not much investigating to be done or story left to tell once Cage guzzles a bottle of Johnnie Walker Red and figures out this numerical code. There’s much ado about the disturbed psychic child who penned these prophecies back in 1959, but that just amounts to arbitrary wheel-spinning before the CGI can finally kick in.

After a few climax building moments and mysterious flashbacks the storyline seems to rely more on running and pure special effects rather than on storyline and dialogue. The special effects complement the theme of Armageddon in the film fairly well and certainly help to bring the moral conclusion, occasionally providing visual cues to foreseen events and a lending a spooky inhuman backdrop to the chaos onscreen. Yet, after all provide only seems to truly shine once the storyline fails to hold the audience’s interest. Without spoiling the plot, it is sufficient to say that the overarching conclusion of the movie is conceived in such a way that the audience will walk away from the film believing they had both their money and time clearly wasted on a cinematic version of one of Kirk Cameron’s Left Behind flicks.