Sometimes a movie comes along that you know nothing about, you see it on a whim, you spend the day out with a friend and see it together. Sometimes you want badly to have a good time, to enjoy a spectacle, to share a good movie. I was sorry to disappoint on a recent outing with a friend of mine. I made the regrettable decision to see Nicolas Cage in "Knowing".
Sitting in the theater, tensed and pissed off, I fidgeted endlessly as this movie assaulted me in an almost sexual fashion. I felt violated by its emotional bludgeoning, sullied by its pathetic lack of subtlety and technique. I was genuinely offended by its plot, its heavy-handed messages and trite, cliche straw-men of atheists and rational thinkers. Everything about this film sickened or angered me in one way or another.
If you ever have the chance, I fucking dare you to watch this movie with an aim to enjoy it.
No groaning, no sighs. Don't be pestered by the inappropriate score, don't sit with mouth agape at its ludicrous plot, nor its sick manipulation of historical tragedy for a catalytic plot point.
If you can actually sincerely enjoy this movie, in all its bland glory, its facsimile of Christian endtimes lunacy, its tired and predictable plot, and its confused melange of science fiction, disaster voyeurism, environmental alarmism, and religious smugness, you may want to seriously re-examine your ability to enjoy good movie-making.
Let's begin, shall we?
Nic Cage is basically rehashing "Next" here. No bones about it. As always, I was okay with Nic, because I think he does good work and he has a persona as an actor that I like. However, I didn't like his character. John Koestler is a poorly-written skeptic; he sounds like the most cliche atheist a Christian could dream up. He's angry at being the son of a pastor, he lost his faith because of a personal tragedy, and basically espouses nihilism. In short, he's exactly what a person who had never met an intellectually justified atheist would think atheists are like. Argh.
The 'story', such as it can be called, begins in 1959 with a young girl, Lucinda Embry, writing a string of numbers on a sheet of paper to be put into a time capsule. The girl apparently hears overly loud whispers that are mixed too high in the film's audio. That's how early I began to shit on this movie in my mind- immediately following the credits. The first mind-blowingly idiotic thing in the movie is John Koestler's lecture to his class on cosmology. He presents a thinly veiled debate between naturalistic and supernaturalistic viewpoints, and takes up the "atheist" side by declaring "shit just happens". Conflating nihilism with non-deterministic philosophies? Thanks, director Alex Proyas and writing staff, you dicks.
John's son attends the same school that the spooky little girl did, so of course when the time capsule from the opening scene is unearthed, who gets the string of numbers but Caleb Koestler, and brings them home to our depressed, nihilistic caricature of an atheist. The numbers Lucinda wrote are apparently predictions of the next 50 years' worth of disasters, told to her by annoyingly loud whispers. But how does John discover that the numbers are not random? Now, this kind of future prediction plot is not entirely uncommon, but if done well it can be mildly entertaining. However, this is the only "future-disaster" movie I know of that had the utter tastelessness and absurd hubris to abuse a national tragedy still fresh in the minds of Americans for a plot point. That's right, when John Koestler's son brings home the number string from the time capsule opening, the first thing John notices is the number string 91101. Way to disrespect a nation.
A couple of punctuation marks later, John's got a full-blown delusion-made-reality on his hands. He goes back through the list of numbers, circles out some date and casualty strings, and confronts one of his fellow skeptical colleagues, who, like any good skeptic, believes that it is a coincidence, not least because of the large amount of uncircled numbers that appear to be random. He thinks John is just looking for a pattern where there isn't one, like those Bible code buffoons.
Of course, what could possibly happen next but John coincidentally being at the exact spot of the next disaster in sequence? How laughably predictable. He looks at his GPS when on the freeway, matches the numbers to the paper, and voila, he's in just the right spot for a disaster. In true "Final Destination" fashion, he tries to do something, anything, to help when a plane crashes. He is however helpless as the camera lingers horrifically on writhing, burning bodies in a positively bloodthirsty fashion. Truly, tastelessness is elevated to an art form by this hellish train wreck of a movie.
The next disaster in sequence is even worse. John chases down a guy who he thinks is going to bomb the subway, but, oops, he was just stealing CDs! Oh, man, talk about being on the wrong track! (Canned laughter) Speaking of wrong tracks... the subway train derails in a gloriously cheesy CGI fashion! Wheeeee! It plows into countless people (some of them even in first-person 'kill-train' camera!) in an orgiastic display of brutish violence. Joy... Mawkish aftermath music would be bad enough, but "Knowing" again assaults the audience by shoving an American flag into the next shot, just like with shoehorning 9/11 into the plot. I don't know what the film seeks to gain by appealing to our sense of patriotism, but it comes off as crass and trashy.
Torturous story short, through some ridiculous non-logic, John finds out that the next disaster will be the end of the world, and that the bible had some prescience of this event (double ugh). A solar flare wiping out the third planet away from the sun? Yeah, that sounds completely plausible.....
To wrap it all up, John finds, in some Rapture-like theological lunacy, that only a few humans have been chosen to be saved from the impending disaster by aliens, who have been stalking him in order to save his son. Caleb and Lucinda Embry's granddaughter are saved by infuriatingly angel-esque aliens, the vast majority of humans die in a huge wave of fiery fucking doom, and Nic Cage reconverts to theism just before disintegrating. Heavy-handed enough for ya?
Sitting through it was hell. I saw every shitty plot point coming a mile away. Poorly executed, trite, preachy, and stupid in the worst way, "Knowing" is a mess of theological and science fiction daftness. Fuck this movie.
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ReplyDeletehonestly, as soon as i saw the name nicholas cage, i skipped to the bottom.
ReplyDeleteIt can already be assumed that any movie with Cage in it is shoddy and a piece of shite.
PS: meant to pass this on earlier, but florida ate my brain for a little while, only to regurgitate it out into an early forensic class and flog it senseless with information about external bevels and sharp force trauma. Apparently, I have also been informed that my professor has dismembered and de-fleshed a human body before. I haven't quite decided if this is a good thing or not. But alas, like all tiny rants, this one must end, so on wards to my intent!
I am passing on this amusing artist who is kind of like listening to an Epileptic Haunted House that occasional drops that little pill of E.
Mami Chan.
be warned, she is hard to find. The album in specific that I am suggesting is Juicy Panic's Otarie, a collaboration between mami chan and some other person who has a name that may or may not start with a "n".
but yes, look her up. And again, emphasis on Hard to Find.
toodles, and in the future, avoid Nicholas Cage