OK, so I really loved the movie Dark City, enjoyed both National Treasure films and dig disaster movies, so when Icon Home Entertainment asked me if I’d like to take a look at a preview copy of the Alex Proyas (director of Dark City) film Knowing starring of course Nicolas Cage (of more recently the National Treasure films) I was really interested.
I actually planned on seeing the film in the cinema because I thought that the idea was pretty clever and despite being hit with a fairly significant spoiler by someone (somewhere, I don’t even remember who dropped the spoiler) I just never got around to the movies to see it.
Now I should also put this out there:
I like Nicolas Cage.
Don’t give me your bullshit wails of protest, go back and watch Moonstruck, Leaving Las Vegas and The Rock. Yes he has done some absolute duds, but he also did Red Rock West and he therefore gets a gold pass.
That’s not to say that he was great in this film. In Knowing he plays John Koestler, a single father and astrophysicist at MIT who through his son comes into possession of a letter that accurately predicts major disasters and leads ultimately towards the end of the world.
Now in all honesty I think that Cage is miscast, he doesn’t quite fit, maybe he is too much, too big a presence on screen? Someone a little more understated possibly would have fitted the character, but like I say I’m a Cage fan so I’m that unhappy and he make generally the most of it, I think maybe even changing his role slightly to better fit the actor should have been the plan of the day if they were sold on him being in the movie.
All that aside, the film in general is not a perfect movie, but there are ideas in there, really big, deep contemplation over a plate of brownies giant ideas that drape themselves over the flawed movie.
And that’s just it, Knowing misfires here and there, there feels like there’s something not quite right, but it does need to be said that there is plenty of good stuff in there as well.
I think what i liked most about it is the mysterious list of numbers that predict the end of the world, had it been some complex mathematical code that the main characters worked out alone then I would have completely disengaged with the film but the ‘code’ is actually quite accessible to the viewer and the process to work it out believable. In fact I’d like to get a hi-res shot of the code to see what other events I could pick out of the list, did I suddenly become a little too morbid?
That is another thing about the film, it certainly does invoke a feeling of dread, a sense of impending doom. The director has completely nailed that feeling and manages to hang on to it for the majority of the movie. There are also extraordinarily eerie ‘whisper men’ that add another layer of menace to the story.
Actually when I think about it, apart from the ending this easily could have been a more than acceptable X-File movie, the mystery is certainly there. I also found a lot of similarities to M. Night Shyamalan’s work.
I still don’t know if I liked the film, but I really love the ideas that it gave me to ponder at night when I can’t sleep. In Australia it has just been released on DVD and BluRay, the advance copy that I had had a trailer for Push (I still want to see this!) and the director’s commentary which gave some interesting insights to what he thought about the motivations of each of the characters.
By the way the spoiler that I had heard actually didn’t turn out to be the biggest surprise in the film so it didn’t hurt so much!
Have you seen Knowing? What did you guys think, especially on the ending (try not to spoil it too much!)
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