Knowing
starring Nicolas Cage, Chandler Canterbury, Rose Byrne and Lara Robinson
written by Ryne Douglas Pearson, Juliet Snowden and Stiles White
directed by Alex Proyas
Rating: ♦♦♦◊◊
I was looking forward to seeing this movie because the premise was really interesting, I thought. So I was disappointed when it turned out to be a confused, almost-directionless piece of crap. Was it the director or the script writers who didn’t know how to finish the story and so resorted to using aliens as a cover for not having a better ending? Shame on someone!
Cage plays widowed university astrophysicist John Koester. A 50-year-old time capsule is unearthed at his son’s elementary school and each student receives something inside written / drawn by children half a century before. His boy gets a curious paper filled with meaningless numbers. But being the scientist he is, Dr. Koester finds a pattern in the numbers and realizes that the little girl who wrote it predicted every major disaster of the last fifty years, its death toll, and precise topographic location. All except for two disasters which haven’t occurred yet. So the professor sets out first to verify his suspicion and then to prevent them form happening. Needless to say, everyone close to him thinks he has been driven mad through grief for his dead wife, or something. I don’t know why the aliens were introduced into this exciting story. They just didn’t know how to end it.
There is one really cool but disturbing scene of an airplane collision with the ground. They won’t be showing that on any aircraft except, maybe, in “altered from its original format” form. Usually when an aircraft says that a film has been “altered from its original format” they mean that the picture’s dimensions have been toyed with to make it fit the small screen size inside an aircraft cabin. But it does not exclude outright editing / censoring, I think.