Review: KNOWING

Editor’s Note: This was originally published for FANGORIA on March 20, 2009, and we’re proud to share it as part of The Gingold Files.

Not since The Butterfly Effect has a movie punched across such a goofy storyline with such wholehearted conviction as Knowing. The fact that the film has you holding your breath as often as it inspires you to roll your eyes is a credit to director Alex Proyas.

Proyas has proven, with The Crow and Dark City, that he can spin spellbinding cinema when provided with strong material, and here demonstrates his ability to command some measure of attention working with a script that seriously needs its head examined. It opens in 1959, when a class full of elementary-school kids is asked to draw their visions of what life will be like 50 years hence, to be put into a time capsule which will be unearthed after that time has gone by. Instead of a rocketship or a robot, little Lucinda (Lara Robinson) covers her paper with a series of apparently random numerals; after the capsule interment ceremony, she’s discovered in a closet in the school’s basement, scratching more numbers into the wall with bloodied fingers.

Cut to the present day, when the capsule is being unearthed, and one of the modern young students is Caleb Koestler (Chandler Canterbury). His father John (Nicolas Cage) is an astrophysics professor who, like all protagonists in movies like this, lives his life in the shadow of a past tragedy that has led him to a point of view which the story’s events will challenge. Specifically, he has become convinced that there’s no order to the universe—that things just happen randomly—ever since the death of his wife in a hotel fire.

Then Caleb gets handed Lucinda’s sealed envelope, and brings home her page of numbers. Upon close examination, it proves to contain the date 9/11/01 and the victim count from that tragic day; the moment where John scrawls those figures on a dry-erase board, and it takes him a few attempts to divide them such that the fateful day is revealed, is an indication of how the screenplay will strain for effect. Soon John discovers that many of the numerals refer to the dates and death tolls from disasters around the world—all of them having occurred since Lucinda scrawled them down. (It’s only one of the movie’s minor plausibility issues that John and a scientist friend take longer to realize what the remaining numbers mean than the audience is likely to.) And three of them, John discovers to his horror, have yet to occur.

Knowing sprang from an original concept by Ryne Douglas Pearson, whose novel Simple Simon inspired the thriller Mercury Rising, which also dealt with numerology, a young boy and a race against time. That film had Bruce Willis bringing his dependable regular-Joe persona to extraordinary events; this one features Cage giving one of his now-patented Nicolas Cage Weird PerformancesTM. His eccentric intensity distractingly threatens to explode into outright mania even in the quieter moments, and the screenwriters (Pearson, Juliet Snowden, Stiles White and apparently a couple of uncredited hands) further this effect as the story develops; scenes in which John attempts to convince Lucinda’s grown daughter Diana (Rose Byrne) and the authorities that the numbers are predictive of future tragedies are implausibly written in ways that make him seem completely off his nut.

But John’s right, of course, and it’s when he and the audience witness the calamities first-hand that Knowing most successfully gets the pulse going. A plane crash is impressively rendered in one long single take, and a setpiece in which an out-of-control Manhattan subway car takes out another and part of a station is truly powerful, even if certain shots suggest that it’s taking place on the C, G and I line. Having failed to avert these losses of life, John teams with an initially reluctant Rose to uncover the meaning of Lucinda’s last prediction, while both Caleb and Rose’s own young daughter Abby (Robinson again) are being afflicted by the same strange whispers in their heads that once spoke to Lucinda, and they continue to be stalked by mysterious men in black…did I mention the mysterious men in black?

Both religious and harder-core science-fiction elements wind up worked into the storyline, along with moments of suburban-Gothic horror, and Knowing could’ve descended into complete Omega Code silliness with a less steady hand at the helm. Instead, Proyas captains this overcrowded ship through its unsteady course with such skill that it’s hard not to suspend enough disbelief to want to see what happens next. He also has some talented craftsmen on board, with the fine cinematography by Simon Duggan setting the proper mood at all times and Marco Beltrami’s score (augmented by well-chosen classical pieces by Beethoven and Gustav Holst) varied enough that it works even when amped up to bombastic levels. And the simple fact that it has more on its mind than the usual empty megamovie spectacle is a plus, even if that mind is severely addled. Knowing is a lot of things—too many things—but dull isn’t one of them.