Movie Review: Knowing

John David and I went to see Nicholas Cage's new film Knowing last night and I find myself losing the conviction that Nicholas Cage knows what it's like to be a human being.  John David is convinced that this movie would never have been made not too many years ago.



Nicholas Cage is some sort of MIT astronomy professor scientist peopleguy who lost his wife to a horrible hotel fire not long ago and is trying to raise their son on his own.  Amid the ongoing depression, he and his son struggle with metaphysical questions about their role in the universe, life after death, and the question of whether or not events are random or determined.  So, you can imagine the conflict for Nicholas Cage when a time capsul at his son's school contains a paper covered in numbers which provide the dates and death toll for "every major global disaster for the last 50 years."

I don't really understand what constitutes a major global disaster in this movie because the death tolls in some of these events are really pretty low and some of them are accidents and some of them are horrible attacks.  And the list of events is short enough to occupy only two sides of a piece of construction paper.  I just think a list of tragedies for the last 50 years would be longer even if you restricted the list of tragedies to "major" ones, but no one explained to me what constitutes a major versus a minor disaster.

Just in case you didn't read the spoiler above, this movie is really beyond ridiculous.

Nicholas Cage makes some really strange decisions as an actor.  He often over plays his emotions and his character just behaves very strangely.  What's even more strange is that his overacting seems to infect other actors in the film by the end and they begin freaking out in some really inappropriate ways.

I can't tell you why most of the major decisions are made by the characters in this film because I would make completely different decisions.  For instance, if you get a list of all the major disasters, why not call the New York Post?  They will publish pretty much anything and it would let more people know what's going on even if it does no good.

And we're fed this whole false dichotomy of random vs. determinism, which, by the way, are defined in a way that makes them sound very similar in my opinion, so by the end of the movie we're left believing that there is some sort of determinism at play, although whatever it is must be vicious.

Between the strange acting, bad writing, and just overall stupid plot, this movie is one to skip.

Posted by: Flibbertigibbet at 03:28 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
Category: State of the Arts
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