Knowing (2009)
Knowing (2009): 6/10
Knowing is such a mixed bag. Such a mixed bag. I wanted this to be really good all the way through. At times the film feels like a real vision from director Alex Proyas. At other times the film loses itself compeltely. I think its good parts make the film worth seeing but it is unfortunately marred by many faults.
Alex Proyas is a director I am interested in and he is the main reason I watched this film. He is a director who makes big budget sci fi but actually has a vision and an eye for shots and furthermore he knows how to put scenes together. His talent for creating foreboding creepiness really works here especially in the first half 45 minutes of the film which is its strong point. The fact that he makes this ridiculous plot and the cliches hidden throughout the film work to a degree is impressive.
The film starts in 1959 when an elementary school class is drawing pictures of what they think the future will look like in 50 years for a time capsule. Lucinda Embry writes down a series of numbers that cover the page obsessively. When she is not able to finish, she hides in the school and scratches the numbers with her fingernails into the closet door. 50 years later the time capsule is opened. Nicolas Cage plays Professor John Koestler a widower (shocker! note the sarcasm) whose son gets Lucinda's envelope. One night John figures out that the numbers note the date and number of deaths for every disaster in the last 50 years. The numbers he cannot figure out he later discovers are the latitude and longitude to where these disasters will happen. The film continues from there and switches gears to become a disaster film about 2/3rds of the way in.
Like I said this film is all over the place. There is also an estranged relationship between Cage and his pastor father, tons of fate/coincidence discussion, aliens, rocks, telepathic whispers and more. It is pretty jam packed with stuff.
The film goes back and forth between scenes that work and scenes that do not work. I really liked everything in the first half hour. The plane accident was not nearly as effective as it should have been and neither is the subway incident. Sometimes the film is so serious that it is hard to go along with it because a film that has a plot like this and takes itself so seriously is bound to have times when it backfires. Cage's character is one we have seen many times before. His wife dying caused him to believe in coincedence and not faith at all. The events in this film force him to reconsider everything. He loves his son blah blah blah. Cage actually does a pretty decent job here in the scenes where he does not have to yell like a maniac or be performing character traits that we have seen many times before. It has become increasingly difficult to take him seriously so the fact that I could at any point in the film is a plus.
For me the point where the film nearly falls apart only to pick itself up for the last 15 minutes is the entrance of Rose Byrne into the film. She plays Lucinda Embry's daughter Diana. I like Rose Byrne. I thought she was great in The Dead Girl and in Sunshine as well. I hear she is great on Damages. I am not sure what happened here. It starts out fine. Her first scene is good. Once she becomes a raving lunatic then the film comes to a ridiculous stand still that involves the audience just waiting for her to die...which she actually does. It is almost like the film was doing us a favor. She becomes so much of a psycho trying to find her kid and Caleb (John's son) that she gets into a car accident and dies. This could have been a very interesting, depressing and kind of disturbing turn of events if we weren't so busy thanking the screenplay for killing off this screaming insane person. Her hysterical scenes are so laughably bad.
Once she is out of the way (she is in the film for about 40 minutes, 25 of those being painful) the film gets back on track. It goes way beyond where you expect it to go by the end. I am sure many people will not take the alien aspect seriously. While I think that the Strangers looked kind of lame, a few tweeks could have made them look pretty frightening. It is in these moments when we see how outlandish the plot really is. It is not the aliens appearance that throws it over the edge but it is the way it connects with the earlier plot developments which is very off.
I still found this scene effective though because it had the courage to carry the weight that it wanted to. Something that I like about the film is that it does not go the way a lot of disaster films go. In disaster films there is always a lot of loss but never really with the main characters. The film does not give two shits about the thousands or millions or billions in casulaties as long as our main characters are okay. While Caleb (John's son) and Abby (Diana's daughter) go on the ship as chosen ones (among what I would guess is a couple of thousand others) to start anew somewhere else, Byrne and Cage to not survive the film...and neither does the entire world.
We have the comfort of knowing that Caleb and Addy are going to be okay. However they also have to deal with the death of their parents, the death of Earth and of not having anyone other than each other at least for now. Then we have John who cannot stop the impending doom and goes to reconcile with his family after saying goodbye to his son and sobbing for a while. Then he and his family get a measly 30 seconds together before the entire world is obliterated. It is extremely grim, extremely dark stuff. Much darker than I would expect to see in a big budget film like this. The film ends with Caleb and Addy in a field and a white tree? Well the film ends on a note of hope which is probably the only reason the film was allowed to exist as is. I thought the last 10 minutes were pretty great and I am surprised it went as bleak and depressing as it did.
Overall the film is a bit of a mess but I do think there are plenty of things to admire here whether it be the ambition, some of the shots, the tone in certain parts or the story. It tries to do something special and while it fails much of the time I think props need to be given to the integrity of the film and of the effort put into it. It can be laughable at times and bad at times but it pulls itself together by the end which is what matters most.
Film & TV on DVD
I have been scared away from Knowing about knowing because of all the horrible reviews I have heard from friends who saw this and no it would piss me off in a good-idea-wasted way.
I loved Alex Proyas' Dark City and to lesser extent The Crow but after that he has continually disappointed. There is nothing nice I can say about I, Robot. That being said I am sure Knowing will slip into the DVD sometime, just for the Proyas completest in me.