Knowing (*½)

Directed by: Alex Proyas
Starring: Nicholas Cage, Rose Byrne, Chandler Canterbury, Lara Robinson, D.G. Maloney
Seen: July 4th 2009

*½ Out of ****

Alex Proyas has made some of my favourite films of all time. I absolutely loved I, Robot, I thought Dark City was superior to The Matrix in almost every way (even though I’m still a huge Matrix fan), and The Crow is one of the biggest cult hits in film history. So it was with a great amount of excitement that I walked into the cinema to see Knowing. Even though Nicholas Cage has not made, shall I call it ‘sterling’, pictures as of late…

The film starts at the William Dawes Elementary School in Massachusetts in 1959, the school’s opening year. For their opening ceremony, the school decides to bury a time capsule containing pictures drawn by the children depicting their idea of the future, to be opened in 50 years’ time. Cut to 2009, where Caleb (Canterbury) is now attending William Dawes Elementary, and the time capsule is opened with each kid getting one of the pictures drawn 50 years earlier. Caleb opens his assigned envelope, deposited in 1959 by Lucinda Embry (Robinson), and she turns out to be the one who didn’t draw a picture. Her paper is simply written full of seemingly random numbers, on both sides.

Caleb takes this home, where his dad, John (Cage), notices a sequence of numbers on the paper – 911012996, and as he looks a bit deeper, he realises it actually reads 9/11/01 – 2996 the amount of people dead on that day. He goes back to the start and finds that the numbers are a perfect sequencing of all the global disasters in the last 50 years, and there are three left. One of them is a spectacular plane crash with John, by absolute chance, being there to charge onto the scene and save a life or two while some more people burn to death. The second is a similarly spectacular subway crash that is jaw-dropping in its intensity. But what happens when the numbers run out?

The third number is not complete, and the film turns into a chase to find out what this number means, what all the numbers mean, and where everything is headed. Up to about 90% into the film the action/tension is great, the story is fantastic, and the pacing is hectic, dragging the viewer along at a breakneck pace. But I gave the film 1.5 out of 4, so surely something must be wrong? And yes, there is, but that would be a spoiler for the film, so I’m keeping moot.

The acting is good enough all around, Nicholas Cage recaptures some of his previous big action movie glimmer, Chandler Canterbury plays his partially deaf son well, Rose Byrne is a slightly unhinged (and partially annoying and stupid) single mother, and the girl they chose to play Diana’s (Byrne) young mother (1959)/daughter (2009) passes for Rose Byrne to a startling degree.

The film is surely ambitious, but the level of Deus Ex Machina (in this case not really saving anything, apart from the writers with the hole they have written themselves into) is staggering. The entire twist to conclusion took 10 minutes during which I lost hope in what I was feeling about the film. Knowing is absolutely stunning, but to me the last ten minutes (i.e. the conclusion) was stunningly crap. It’s been a long time since I felt this cheated by a film, and I’m left with one question (of two parts) only: Bunnies? Really?