My favorite part of this job is definitely attending rom-coms and kids' movies by myself, but second to that, what I like best is being subjected to the same trailer up to a dozen times before the movie it's advertising actually comes out.
With that much preview-watching experience, I can read these things like tea leaves. Like when the trailer for Knowing showed Nicolas Cage launching into a soundbite lecture about the "theory of randomness," I knew for a fact that the movie would go on to conclusively prove everything happens for a reason, and it would do so with a scholarly thoroughness that didn't rely at all on coincidence, extraterrestrials, or buckets of arbitrary lunacy that might not have even made sense in the writers' own heads.
What I didn't expect was how utterly fantastic all that would turn out to be.
Fifty years ago, a disturbed little girl scrawled a list of numbers and put it in her school's time capsule. In the present day, Nicolas Cage's son attends that school, and when the capsule's opened, the kid takes the list home.
A set of numbers catches Cage's eye. As he investigates (as an alcoholic widower, he's got nothing but time), he discovers the list has been predicting the dates, casualties, and locations of major tragedies — an unbelievable proposition that's proven true when Cage witnesses a plane crash the next day. That too was on the list.
His effort to head off the next tragedy proves fruitless. He'll need to find a way to change the future soon, because the next prediction — just days away — will prove the biggest threat of them all.
Knowing is a rare and special treat: a cuckoo-crazy madhouse masquerading as a ho-hum thriller. Most of its duration, Cage splits his time between freaking out everyone he knows and incompetently attending disasters he's powerless to do anything about. Good thing, too, because if he were any good at stopping them, we'd miss out on all those sweet crashes and kerplosions. Without their raw excitement — seriously, they're good — I'd have been tempted to take a nap well before we reached its glorious conclusion.
Director Alex Proyas also throws out a lot of vaguely supernatural nonsense, which is usually the warning sign of much greater nonsense to come. Whispers without a source, black rocks appearing everywhere for absolutely no reason, pale, Nordic creeps menacing Cage's son — I think this is meant to be intriguing, but what it says to me is "Gird your loins for some dopey shit."
On the other hand, Cage's kid being forced to dream about flaming elk is pretty compelling stuff.
Yet any lingering confusion, tedium, or frustrations are swept right away once the story stops beating off and gets to the point (incidentally, this takes forever). Normally I'd be hesitant to talk too much about a movie's third act, but since Knowing is intentionally misleading about where it's headed, almost as if it's ashamed of itself, and because it's so awesome, I'm throwing spoiler ethics right out the window.
You see, Knowing is basically pro-annihilation of Earth. It's a bold stance, one you rarely see from those cowards in Hollywood, what with their spineless desire to go on existing, so it's about time someone stood up and said "Hey, shut up and take your Armageddon." It's a bracing wake-up call that no matter how much you miss your dead wife, those feelings are nothing that can't be solved by being incinerated into a two-dimensional spray of carbon. P.S.: Who likes inbreeding?
I'm happier just thinking about it! Right now my life is so affirmed I've totally forgotten how absurd it is that the little girl predicted the reported dead rather than the actual dead, allowing Cage to crack the case with a Google search and a fifth of scotch. It's a real feat for a movie that's 80% boredom to leave you with a smile on your face. Cheers, Knowing. I'll see you in Hell.
Grade: D+