Alex Proyas, director of such film as I, Robot and Dark City latest film Knowing stars Nicolas Cage as a MIT professor that has stumbled upon a list, buried fifty years earlier, predicting various disasters throughout the last fifty years. Finding disasters on the horizon, Professor Koestler attempts to decipher the code and save the day. The film questions the audience, is life preordained or a random series of events? A question cleverly posed in a lecture by Cage’s character. This question is never really answered directly in the film, but doesn’t affect the story either way, allowing the viewer to decide.
The film has a great initial premise and the first scene nails a perfect balance between eerie horror and intriguing drama. This scene manages to inject a sense of terror into the film. The terror element wears off quickly, though, as the story progresses more into sci-fi thriller territory for the remainder of the film, opting for spectacle over story.
Proyas manages to create great disaster set pieces throughout the film, with the carnage amped up to 11 and the overall execution makes the scenes a wonder to look at, with planes exploding, people burning, subway cars smashing everything in sight, and people being pulverized. Cage can be distracting in these moments, looking on stupefied as everything around him crumbles.
The acting in the film is fine but, Cage, in particular, plays the character so seriously that it detracts from the film, he becomes somewhat unbelievable as the movie progresses and makes himself, rather than the scene going on, the center of attention. The child actors stand out as being very capable, the girl in the opening sequence coming off as legitimately terrifying and Professor Koelsters son(Chandler Canterbury) doing a good job of conveying the terror he was supposed to be feeling.
The real problem with Knowing is that the reasons behind most things that occur are not explained, instead the film moves along adding more elements and becoming increasingly bizarre up until the vague conclusion. This leaves something to be desired, if the story perhaps only focused on the disasters and left out the supernatural element then it surely would have been more enjoyable.
In the end Knowing is a spectacle film that is weighed down by the supernatural element it contains. While the film works at times, it fails to create an enjoyable movie-going experience, and instead ranks as a missed opportunity.
Score: 4/10
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