Knowing (2009)
Directed by Alex Proyas
A teacher opens a time capsule that has been dug up at his son's elementary school; in it are some chilling predictions -- some that have already occurred and others that are about to -- that lead him to believe his family plays a role in the events that are about to unfold.
24 connections found
View:
24 films that influenced Knowing
What critics say influenced Knowing
What do you get when you cross "When Worlds Collide," "Close Encounters of the Third Kind," and "Deep Impact?"
With Knowing, director Alex Proyas (The Crow; I, Robot; Dark City) has scooped up a little M. Night Shyamalan, tossed in a heaping helping of Close Encounters of the Third Kind and written most of the cheques on his rumoured $50 million budget for CGI trickery.
Blending doomsday mysticism, otherworldly phenomena, parental concern and quasi-spiritualism, Knowing blatantly references Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
It's unlikely that Knowing will become a classic YouTube howler like The Wicker Man (go to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6i2WRreARo to enjoy the hilarity), but this latest dud starring Nicolas Cage does bring to mind the title of MAD magazine's Close Encounters of the Third Kind spoof.
Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Contact, and, most directly, Signs (and its heavy-handed spiritual overtones) all factor into John’s emergence from his crisis of faith, with the film suffering from a derivative and patchwork second half that doesn’t satisfyingly follow through on its initially intriguing setup.
And then there’s the whole business of using mass destruction in order to patch up dysfunctional families (see also Spielberg’s War of the Worlds from 2005).
Unfortunately, Proyas and his battalion of screenwriters had to come up with answers and once they do, it’s all downhill (toward the apocalypse) from there with plot elements borrowed from George Pal’s 1951 science-fiction film, When Worlds Collide, Stephen Spielberg’s 1977 science fiction classic, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and Mimi Leder’s Deep Impact (a.k.a. the Other Asteroid Movie).
As something deeper that attempts to touch upon religion, faith, and destiny vs. coincidence, it comes off as a less genuine thematic cousin to 2002's " Signs " that hasn't quite figured out what it wants to say.
This reading is based largely on a single scene in which Koestler presents exactly that question to his students, before collapsing in a depressive fit (like Mel Gibson in Signs , Koestler suffered an incredible crisis in faith when his wife died in an apparent accident).
The plot, too, is a sham (shades of Signs and Close Encounters), and Proyas's slick visuals do little to dress it up.
It veers pretty close to the crackpot turf mapped out by M. Night Shyamalan in "Signs."
Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Contact, and, most directly, Signs (and its heavy-handed spiritual overtones) all factor into John’s emergence from his crisis of faith, with the film suffering from a derivative and patchwork second half that doesn’t satisfyingly follow through on its initially intriguing setup.
First is a leaden screenplay with non-existent pacing and plot-twist predications – like an a-ha! moment with a power tool – as dumb as the cereal-box moment of Lady in the Water.
At its lunatic best, the film's a version of "The Happening" in which something actually happens.
Knowing is essentially nothing more than an unwanted cross between The Happening and The Number 23 , with an unexpected though ultimately not inexplicable dusting of the TV series Lost for flavoring: agnostic MIT cosmologist Jon Koestler (Cage; the character is credited as "John", though at one point we hear his father call him "Jonathan") comes into possession of a fifty-year-old page of numbers written out by a schoolchild, that when correctly decoded provides the date, location and body count of every major global disaster between the Octobers of 1959 and 2009.
It makes the most memorable use of the second movement of the Beethoven Seventh Symphony since John Boorman’s Zardoz (1974).
Advertisement
"Knowing" is an "X-Files" kitchen sink so stuffed with genre allusions - sci-fi, paranormal and spiritual - that it's hard to tell where its heart is, although Alex Proyas, director of "The Crow," "Dark City" and "I, Robot," has had experience with all three.
But this sci-fi tale, directed by Alex Proyas (“Dark City,” “The Crow”) and based on a story by Ryne Douglas Pearson (who wrote the novel “Mercury Rising” was based on), moves with urgency and unflagging energy.
Directed by Alex Proyas, who seemed like Hollywood's idea of a visionary until he followed the pre-"Matrix" sci-fi mind games of "Dark City" (1998) with the Asimovian atrocity of "I, Robot" (2004), "Knowing" hinges on a promising premise: What if a time capsule, unearthed in 2009 on the 50th anniversary of its burial, contained a numerological note from the past accurately predicting five decades of deadly disasters, including several yet to come?
…lex Proyas was once a promising filmmaker with slick genre flicks like “The Crow” and “Dark City” to his name.
I went confidently into "Knowing" solely because of my faith in director Alex Proyas, who, in 1998, made one of my favorite films, the groundbreaking sci-fi "Dark City," which pioneered some ideas "The Matrix" later took credit for.
"Knowing" is an "X-Files" kitchen sink so stuffed with genre allusions - sci-fi, paranormal and spiritual - that it's hard to tell where its heart is, although Alex Proyas, director of "The Crow," "Dark City" and "I, Robot," has had experience with all three.
Directed by Alex Proyas, who used to make moves like The Crow, the film is perhaps not as worthy of scorn as others of its tired apocalyptic brethren.
But this sci-fi tale, directed by Alex Proyas (“Dark City,” “The Crow”) and based on a story by Ryne Douglas Pearson (who wrote the novel “Mercury Rising” was based on), moves with urgency and unflagging energy.
…lex Proyas was once a promising filmmaker with slick genre flicks like “The Crow” and “Dark City” to his name.
Director Alex Proyas (I, Robot, Dark City, The Crow) certainly knows how to pull off complex action set-pieces, but he and his screenwriters also seem to be genuinely interested in exploring the meaning behind the madness.
You get Alex Proyas’ ("I, Robot," "Garage Days," "Dark City," "The Crow") latest film, "Knowing," an apocalyptic, science-fiction/mystery thriller starring the ubiquitous Nicholas Cage (eighteen lead roles in the last ten years) as an astrophysicist out to save his son, himself, and, if time allows, the world.
But over the course of the last decade, any reputation he might have earned was lost after a less-than-stellar reception to the Australian rock indie “Garage Days” and the sci-fi blockbuster “ I, Robot .”
You get Alex Proyas’ ("I, Robot," "Garage Days," "Dark City," "The Crow") latest film, "Knowing," an apocalyptic, science-fiction/mystery thriller starring the ubiquitous Nicholas Cage (eighteen lead roles in the last ten years) as an astrophysicist out to save his son, himself, and, if time allows, the world.
Caleb, meantime, is being visited by said mysterious strangers from beyond—who apparently monitor our media and enjoyed Rutger Hauer in Blade Runner, Spike in “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and Sting in Dune, since they all do the white-spiky-hair, glowering, trench-coat thing.
But this sci-fi tale, directed by Alex Proyas (“Dark City,” “The Crow”) and based on a story by Ryne Douglas Pearson (who wrote the novel “Mercury Rising” was based on), moves with urgency and unflagging energy.
Caleb, meantime, is being visited by said mysterious strangers from beyond—who apparently monitor our media and enjoyed Rutger Hauer in Blade Runner, Spike in “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and Sting in Dune, since they all do the white-spiky-hair, glowering, trench-coat thing.
Advertisement
It’s here that Knowing could achieve the pop-culture poetry of unexpected heroism in Unbreakable, and Cage could channel the paternal persistence of Jeff Bridges in Arlington Road (another great from Pellington).
An opening prologue in 1959 sets a tone of paranormal pathos and paranoia shared by Mark Pellington’s underrated The Mothman Prophecies, but it doesn’t last long.
Seemingly just as committed to the drama was composer Marco Beltrami, whose loud, intense, unnerving score seems mashed together from the most propulsive elements of Bernard Herrmann's music for "Psycho" and Danny Elfman's music for "Pee-wee's Big Adventure."