The basic premise of Alex Proyas' latest film is as follows: fifty years prior to the events of the film, a time capsule is buried at a local school containing the students' pictoral predictions of the future. One disturbed child, Lucinda (Lara Robinson), frantically writes down a long string of numbers as opposed to the pictures of robots and spaceships her classmates are drawing. Fifty years on, the young son of professor of astrophysics John Koestler (Nicolas Cage) comes into possession of those same numbers. Koestler soon begins to suspect a sinister and telling pattern hidden in the sequence that may have dire consequences for both himself and the human race as a whole.
Some Mysteries Aren't Worth Knowing
Knowing, which reputedly went through multiple writers before reaching the screen, is an intriguing, beguiling mess. For a film so obviously striving for something different, Alex Proyas ends up directing his own idealism into cliché, disastrously undoing his own admirable intentions.
It’s a real shame. Over the course of the first two thirds or so, you’d be forgiven for thinking that Knowing might actually end as strongly as it began; that is, until an overblown, cop-out finale manages to deconstruct everything that came before. However much the setup may be appreciated for its technical adeptness (there are two well staged, well shot action set pieces) and genuine sense of intrigue, it soon becomes apparent that everything good about the film was nothing but smoke and mirrors.
The revelations at the film’s conclusion immediately set about retrospectively ruining all that good scene-setting. The mysterious strangers in the woods, previously a malevolent, eerie presence, are exposed as senseless mystery-baiting, and the ecclesiastical excesses of the finale feel disjointed given the lack of time granted to religious concerns during the first half of the film. It feels like two or three different endings have been unsuccessfully stitched together in an attempt to satisfy everybody and, by consequence, end up satisfying nobody. It’s an all too common criticism levelled at scripts which have been contributed to from many angles.
Even more jarring is the descent into distracting melodrama; watching Cage’s disgruntled father figure literally fall to his knees in awe is oddly laughable, as are the character’s sudden and frankly ludicrous changes of opinion. Although Cage isn’t exactly stretching himself, it’s a decent enough performance until the final act, and there is certainly an element of script defeating actor rather than the other way around. On the plus side, youngster Chandler Canterbury (who recently appeared in David Fincher’s The Curious Case of Benjamin Button) is charming and convincing as Koestler’s young son.
Smoke and Mirrors
In the end, Knowing is a film that cheats the viewer and simply can’t keep up the facade after Proyas plays his hand. It has too many ideas and tries too hard to reconcile all of them, forfeiting any chance of a poignant conclusion along the way. Any sense of enjoyment will inevitably dwindle as the credits roll, and a second viewing is almost pointless. Strangely, the film would’ve been less disappointing if the opening acts had mirrored the conclusion; as it stands, it’s a film that promises much but ultimately can’t deliver.
