I was recently talking to someone about the movie Knowing and could have sworn that I had reviewed it previously. But, looking through my archives, I couldn’t find it. The movie was directed by Alex Proyas, who is still living off his wonderful movie Dark City (my review). None of the movies he’s made since then really have the same visual appeal, but he does keep trying. Nicholas Cage dominates the movie and he chews up scenery thoroughly. Knowing isn’t a great movie, but I get the feeling that there could have been a good movie somewhere in here. Let’s check it out.
We start the movie in the 50s where the students at a new school are writing letters or drawing pictures for the time capsule at their new school. One young girl is furiously scribbling numbers with a maniacal intensity. 50 years later, young Caleb gets her letter. He shares this weird letter with his father (and astrophysicist) John (Nicholas Cage). John’s thinks it’s some sort of weird code and is looking to break it. While stuck in a traffic jam, he notices that the numbers on the paper match his current latitude/longitude and current time. He jumps out to see what is happening at the accident. The police officer starts telling John to get back in his car when he starts running. John turns around and sees a plane coming in to crash.
This leads John on a quest to track down all the other latitude/longitude/time numbers in the letter. This leads him to a trail of disasters and two things left. One is coming up in New York, the other is the mysterious backwards 33 that ends the letter. John, using Caleb, tracks down the daughter (and granddaughter) of the girl who wrote the original letter and with her help tries to warn everyone about the upcoming disaster. After that goes unsuccessfully, the quartet goes to the woman’s house where she spent her last years coping with mental illness. The find the secret of the backwards 33 and then have to decide what to do with that information.
Overall, it’s a fairly generic thriller/disaster film. Proyas details the plane crash with loving care as is the animation of what John (and friends) believe will happen later. the characters are, for the most part, flat and uninteresting. And the final scenes with the kids comes out of left field and makes no sense whatsoever. But I’m making the movie sound worse than it was. It’s not a bad popcorn flick that has some decent special effects and enough of a mystery to not bore you completely. Mildly recommended.