Knowing (2009)

KNOWING starts in 1958 when a group of students bury a time capsule containing letters. One mysterious girl fills her sheet with what looks like random numbers. Fast forward to present days and the time capsule is exhumed and the letters are given to students to read. The girl's strange letter finds its way into the hands of Caleb Myles but the letter quickly captures the interest of his father Ted Myles (Nicolas Cage), who quickly discovers that the numbers are not random and that they depict the dates, death tolls and coordinates of major catastrophic events from the past and future. Ted tries to alert the authorities but when his warnings go unanswered he has to take matters into his on hands to prevent and a major event which threatens more destruction.

With Alex Proyas previous sci-fi offerings like DARK CITY and I, ROBOT things looked to be lining up well for this one when word first hit the RCR office. The trailers and promotional work all looked quite reasonable and the synopsis sounded quite interesting but sadly KNOWING fails to live up to it's expectations. It's not that it's a bad movie, it isn't really. It's just below average. The story itself is decent but it suffers from over done special effects and some horrible acting from Cage. It's been quite sometime since he has done anything of note and of late. Movies like THE WICKER MAN remake and GHOST RIDER only serve to remind us of his recent descent.

The criticism that came out most when the movie first hit theatres was that the ending was poor but personally I thought this was the only thing that kept the movie from being bad.

Check it out if you have sometime to kill but If your looking for an excellent sci-fi movie then I can't recommend Proyas' DARK CITY highly enough. It really is a little gem of a flick.

Date: 29/04/2009
Rating: 2.5/5
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