There is nothing more disappointing than a film with a smart premise and a smarter screenplay that just falls flat on its face. Knowing is one such film.
A very well-mounted thriller
A time capsule is buried in the ground by the students of an elementary school in 1959 which would be opened by students fifty year later. The students are told to draw their vision of the future world but Lucinda Embry ends up writing strange numbers on a sheet of paper that make no sense.
She seems possessed by strange whispers that no one else hears and doesn't stop writing even after her teacher asks her to stop. Fifty years later, Caleb Koestler opens Lucinda's letter in his school and shows it to John, his astrophysicist father.
A widower John becomes obsessed with the paper as he realizes that the numbers depict every major disaster that has occurred in the past fifty years. The numbers represent the date, the number of deaths and the location of the disasters.
John is baffled with the discovery and when he realizes the dates of three future disasters becomes possessed with the thought of diverting the accidents.
He joins hands with the dead Lucinda's daughter, Diana and granddaughter, Abby, to unearth Lucinda's last clue. With no one believing them and strangers following their every move, the four race against time.
Knowing isn't like any average thriller. It's very well mounted thanks to the first half hour of the screen time that it utilizes to set up. The writing is very interesting and talks about the ideas of fate, chance and randomness interspersed with well-etched emotional drama.
With each passing moment the tension only heightens and you are sucked into a vortex of mystery that seems to be going some where. Marco Beltrami's background score is a big mood builder in the journey but sadly when we reach the destination we realize that it's no where!
Nicholas Cage as a manic John Koestler is very two dimensional. He is so busy running around that had it not been the dialogues we would have never believed anything about him.
Knowing isn't Armageddon or Deep Impact or even 2012 but is a very cerebral film that had the potential to be visceral and thought-provoking but it just fails in the final 10 minutes. For whatever its worth Knowing will surely keep you glued.
Rating: 2 out of 5
Cast: Nicolas Cage, Chandler Canterbury, Rose Byrne, Lara Robinson
Screenplay by: Ryne Pearson and Juliet Snowden & Stiles White and Stuart Hazeldine
Directed by: Alex Proyas
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