Post by BIGFANBOY on Mar 19, 2009 23:05:00 GMT -5
KNOWING
Review by Gary Dean Murray
Good sci-fi almost seems a miracle to pull off. For every great story set in the realm of the future, there are scads of shards of destroyed concepts, ideas that just didn't produce in the heroic scheme of grandeur. When they work, science fiction stories can bring emotions and logic together into something that is truly magical. But, when it doesn't work, the results can be all kinds of bad.
Which brings us to Knowing.
The story starts in 1959 with a strange little girl and a time capsule. The young one has suggested that the class draw pictures of the future to be placed in the vault. It is for the elementary students fifty years from now, so they can see what was imagined by what will be senior citizens. But, our little girl doesn't draw pictures but a series of seemingly random numbers. Also a mysterious man watches our little heroine as she attends school and eventually goes down the rabbit hole into madness.
It is now the present. John Koestler (Nicolas Cage) is a scientist dad with a dead wife and hearing impaired son Caleb. Dad is a man of reason and not of faith, believing that life is just a series of random events. This causes some rifts since he is the son of a man of the cloth.
At the elementary school opening of the time capsule, Caleb gets the cryptic message of random numbers and doesn't know what to make of it. That night, John is looking at the numbers and sees 9/11/01 and the amount of dead. Copying down all the numbers on a dry erase board, he begins to see a pattern that corresponds to all the major disasters that have happened in the last fifty years. There is no way this could be a random event. And according to the paper, there are two major ones yet to happen. Also added into the mystery is the little fact that Caleb's hearing aide has been picking up some strange signals.
Thus begins John's search to find out about the person who wrote the numbers and how the other numbers correlate to events in the future. He befriends the daughter and granddaughter of the little girl. Mom Diana (Rose Byrne) and her daughter Abby are more than a little freaked out by John and his outrageous claims. But they also know that something big is about to happen very soon. All this and the same group of mysterious men who now seem to be following Caleb lead to a stunning conclusion that was not a surprise at all.
If one were to assign blame for this mis-mash of style over substance, it would fall directly on the director. Alex Proyas takes what could have been a serious thriller and wraps it in cliché after cliché. There is never the solid grounding in science that the story needs. The aliens feel like rejects from Invasion of the Body Snatchers but with even less personality. For some reason, they give out little black rocks. Like much of this film, it is never explained and is professed to have some deeper meaning that is just lost.
But the two big set pieces are a marvel of editing and CGI. The crashes thunder across the screen with an air of believability seldom seen from Hollywood. A train station crash is especially stunning almost jumping from the screen to your lap.
Nicolas Cage gives it a good reading but doesn't bring anything truly imaginative to the role. This feels more like a paycheck than the work of a committed thespian. For a guy who has shown so much promise early in his career, it feels like he is much more interested in just being there than being a part of something wonderful. The rest of the cast doesn't bring much either. Like bad sci-fi writing, when the story is more idea over character the results suffer. One would hope with four writers they could have created more interesting characters.
In what could be called Close Encounters of the Last Kind, this has all the elements of half a dozen other sci-fi classics without being a classic itself. A fair effort but little more than that.
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