Knowing is like Close Encounters meets The Day After Tomorrow. It’s the movie Keanu Reeves’ Day the Earth Stood Still remake wished it could have been. It’s liquid science fiction, poured straight into your brain without shame or another one of Hollywood’s pathetic attempts to disguise sci-fi as something more acceptable to the dumbed down masses.
The plot at first, plays out like a lot of the other really terrible movies Nicholas Cage has made lately. Cage is a somewhat geeky father whose kid gets a letter from inside a time capsule. Written fifty years ago the letter details, using dates, death tolls, and coordinates, every major disaster that’s happened in the last 50 years. There are 3 more to go, and the first of them happens tomorrow.
Nic Cage plays something of a dufus and while it’s a far from perfect performance it’s more adequate than anything he’s done recently. Cage is at his best when he’s playing a nerd and watching him shake and weep in the movie’s big do or die moments, when others might have played it macho, is exactly the kind of tone this movie needs.
Knowing is a downer, by design. The plot is heavy on the sci-fi, by design. Some won’t be able to handle it or maybe they just won’t get it. At least one person in my screening stood up and quite literally shouted “fucking science fiction!” before stomping out. It’s just not as cool to be a sci-fi movie as it used to be. Trendy or not, Proyas knows science fiction and he’s delivered a capable sci-fi film with a few stunning set pieces and more than a little thought behind it.
If there’s any real criticism to be leveled at Knowing it’s that maybe it needed a stronger message. Transcendent sci-fi says something substantive about the real world and it seems like that’s the kind of science fiction Knowing wants to be. But its message is only faintly whispered and somewhat muddled, lost to the hands of fate, wiped out by the end of the world.
Knowing is far from director Alex Proyas best movie and it’s a serious bummer, but as solid science fiction it works. It's entertaining and engrossing. Don’t dismiss it.
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