Review of Knowing (2009) by Van R — 23 May 2012

"Knowing" is numbing. In 1959, an elementary school girl, Lucinda Embry, comes up with the bright idea of planting a time capsule with drawings in it that nobody will see for five decades, but she doesn't draw a picture. Instead, she goes numbers crazy and jots down numbers ad nauseaum. Five decades elapse like yesterday and the school unearths the capsule and every student gets a drawing. One of those students, Caleb Koestler (Chandler Canterbury), is the son of widowed MIT Professor astrophysicist John Koestler (Nicolas Cage), and he gets a page filled with nothing but numbers. Dear old dad gets soused one night and eyeballs the numerals and discovers that the number grouping are the days that disasters have happened and may happen. Suddenly, stealthy white-haired guys in long coats start showing up and giving Caleb little black rocks. By the way, Caleb has a hearing problem and his hearing device is acting up. Meanwhile, we learn that John's wife died in a motel fire on the other end of the country while he was blowing leaves off his front yard and now he believes that life is a meaningless series of random acts, until he lays his eyes on those numbers. Incidentally, since his widow got burned up, John has refused to have a conversation with his father who is a minister.

This science fiction hokum has zero suspense until one of his relatives sneaks up behind him and jostles his chair. The special effects are substandard and the entire thing looks like it was shot on videotape and blown up to 35 mm. Indeed, director Alex Proyas used digital cameras and the images look muddy. Things grow progressively worse and John tracks down the Lucinda's daughter and they team up to figure out the mystery. The scene where the jetliner crashes is a ho-hum affair as is the subway accident. The finale with the sun flaring out and burning the Earth to a cinder is pretty bad, too. Yes, Nic bites the dust, but helpful aliens--those Whisper dudes--who have been communicating with Caleb the entire time--transport him and Lucinda's daughter's daughter off to another planet to start all over.

Usually, I don't like to blow a movie's big surprise, but "Knowing" really sucked. Call it Crappy Encounters of a Close Kind and save your money!