Review 398: Knowing

Knowing has an interesting premise and a unique atmosphere but never amounts to much and ultimately becomes something rather disposable and forgettable.

Jonathan "John" Koestler (Nicholas Cage) is an astrophysics professor working at MIT and a single father who lives with his son Caleb (Chandler Canterbury) who finds a list of seemingly random numbers that was buried in a time capsule since the 1950's. John studies the numbers and realises the numbers are actually dates for every major disaster for the past 5 decades as well as all their victims. John investigates further and discovers Diane Wayland (Rose Byrne) and her daughter Abby (Lara Robinson) who may have a connection to when the list was originally written. John further realises that one of the dates that the lists predicts could hint at a disaster on a global scale.

The plot sounds intriguing, but in practice it's pretty slack, at no point is the premise developed to its full potential or told in an interesting way and at no point is it executed well. The screenplay authored by Ryan Douglas Pearson is not lacking for interesting ideas like the whole question of science vs faith and searching for meaning in the universe and in life, handing hope down to our children and the next generation, families and the cycle of life continuing but they’re only paid minor surface level lip service.

The whole affair comes across as lacklustre, dull and underwhelming

 

It also comes up short in the storytelling department, yes the premise is intriguing but nothing in the way it's told is interesting and none of it is really told with any flair or energy or emotion for that matter. This pacing of this film is so laborious and drags so much and never really picks up steam and gets rolling that you start to loose interest just as it's getting interesting.   It asks big questions but can’t seem to decide what to do with them 

Knowing leaves many questions unanswered - 

but it just doesn't mesh with the more sic-fi/disaster elements of the film making it a very uneven film, 

For a film with seemingly world-ending consequences, Knowing feels small in scope keeping the focus solely on Koestler's family and friends and rarely widening out to show the larger picture of a doomed mankind. Which wouldn’t be so bad if the characters were interesting, unfortunately my investment in is stunted by the fact that I just don’t give a damn about what happens to any of these characters. The overall story suffers as a result and the emotional stakes are sorely lacking.

It is also a relentlessly depressing film, this film is just soaked with a huge sense of doom and gloom and never really finds a glimmer of hope in all this disaster leaving this dead feeling inside the viewer as this film plods to it's inevitable conclusion.

And then, we get to the ending - and I don't know about you but the ending of this film just angered me. I'm not going to spoil it but it just felt arbitrary, cliched and unlikely and left me feeling empty, unfulfilled, manipulated and betrayed and just came across as a result of unimaginative writers who just took the easy way out.

Director Alex Proyas direction is both tonely uneven, disjointed and dramatically inhert, lending the film an intriguing and suspenseful atmosphere

the film is primarily sic-fi but it also includes elements of thriller, horror and some of horror and Proyas fails to strike a balance or find the human element. The special effects in this film are not very good, they're not terrible by any means, but they're defiantly not what you'd expect from a big budget disaster film.
However, the score by Marco Beltrami is appropriately creepy, the cinematography is stylish and captures the gritty, fantastical realism, the production design is terrific and captures the dark, horror-esque atmosphere of the film, the costumes are neat, there are some good moments of suspense but they clash badly with the more sci-fi elements of the film.

As for the acting department, Nicholas Cage proves to be fundamentally unengaging and gives a lacklustre performance. On paper the character of John Koestler is very interesting, he's a single father, he's a professor and MIT, a widower and a heavy drinker but Cage just possess the 

As the film progresses and Cage starts to look into the numbers on the paper, he became even less interesting because there's no sense of proactiveness in his character. This is mostly in part to a script and direction that gives him little to do other than to mope and act depressed as well as contemplate the impending doom.

As for Rose Byrne for all her beauty the script gives her very little to do as the female lead. She tries to avoid the destiny the numbers predict for and she cries a lot. Diane Wayland is just a really thin character Nothing intriguing comes out of this character.

Remarkably Chandler Canterbury and Lara Robinson give much more compelling performances than their adult counterparts. They're charm and likability and sense of innocence to what's happening throughout the film is very apparent from the way they act, interact with the adult actors and their facial expressions.

Ben Mendelsohn rounds out the small cast in a small but unremarkable supporting role as a work colleague of the Nicholas Cage character.

Knowing is depressing and forgettable, 2/5.

The Anonymous Critic.