Movie Review: Knowing
MightyThor’s Rating: 2 / 5 Shiny Black Stones

Recently, Donjuanica and I started engaging in the age-old manly tradition of a Boys’ Night Out (and no, you may not call it a man-date, because we always make sure to bring one or more additional manly persons along). Really, the whole thing is an elaborate excuse to let us go see movies that our wives wouldn’t be interested in.
Well a week or so ago, we went and saw the only film that was currently showing that seemed in any way interesting, the latest Nicholas Cage supernatural thriller “Knowing.” Let me prefece this review also by saying that the film was recommended to us by a friend of Donjuanica, whose opinions are forever suspect now.
If you’re planning to see “Knowing” for yourself, just know that I give it a “Wait until it comes to TV” rating, and do not read on because of the dreaded advent of SPOILERS AHEAD (I don’t know why I have to type that in all caps, but it seems the thing to do.) For you intrepid readers who want the skinny, read on.
I’ll freely admit that I was actually enjoying “Knowing” until about the last twenty minutes. At that point, the film turned so ridiculous as to actually turn back time and punch me in the groin at the beginning. It was all very strange. If you don’t know the story, Nicholas Cage is a professor of astro-physics or something, whose son participates in the opening of a time capsule at school. The capsule contains drawings by the school’s original students of what they think the world would look like 50 years in the future. Cage’s son gets one of the drawings, which is just a page full of random-seeming numbers, which turn out to be dates of global catastrophes and the number of people killed, separated by another set of numbers that they can’t figure out without what Atticusser and I would call an “extraordinary coincidence,” in the vein of all great SFOP’s. That extraordinary coincidence is when Cage ends up at the exact spot where a jetliner crashes across a freeway, which was predicted by the magic number sheet, and thanks to his car’s GPS, he realizes that the unexplained sets of numbers are the GPS coordinates of each catastrophe.
So, blah blah blah, the numbers predict the end of the world, blah blah blah, Cage has just happened to have formerly published a paper on super solar flares, blah blah blah, he figures out that a super flare is about to roast the earth and there’s nothing they can do to stop it.
Enter the “whisper people.”
Throughout the film there are these semi-creepy Val Kilmer look-alike guys dressed all in black who are kinda stalking Cage’s kid, and they keep giving him these smooth black rocks that are supposed to be significant. And they whisper to the kid, indicating that he is somehow special, just like the little girl who first wrote the page of magic numbers, except she went insane and killed herself, but not before having a daughter who had another daughter, who also can hear the whispers that only certain people can hear.
Enter the love interest.
The love interest freaks out when the whisper men kidnap her and Cage’s kids while they’re all running away to hide in some caves that have no hope of saving them from the super solar flare. She runs a red light, gets hit by a semi.
Exit the love interest.
This was about the point at which I realized that this movie had lost its way a little.
To make a long review slightly less long, Cage finds the kids at the dry riverbed where the smooth black stones are found (so much for significant). The whisper men, as anticipated, reveal themselves to be aliens. But they’re benevolent aliens, who want to help humanity start over. So they offer to take the children with them, and Cage thinks, “Great, we’re saved!” But wait! No, Cage, you can’t come. You didn’t “hear the call.” Meaning he was for some reason immune to the insanity-inducing whispers of random numbers that tell the future, unlike his kid. So in a desperate bid to save his son’s life, he tells him he has to go with the aliens, and they take off with the kids, leaving him crying on the smooth black stones.
Uh…right. I know it’s the end of the world and all, but you put your kid on a ship full of creepy aliens and sent him off into space. Riiiiight.
I wasn’t sure quite how they were going to wrap the movie up from there, but it involved classical music, scenes of looting amid the growing heat, an ever-so-touching reunion between Cage and his estranged parents, who all share a hug, followed by a visually spectacular scene of the earth being swallowed up by fire and burnt to a crisp.
But don’t fret! The benevolent aliens (did I mention they were glowing featureless humanoids who had wing shapes appear behind them when they took the kids up to their ship?), well they drop the kids off on a planet flowing with golden wheat fields, and in the background you see other ships leaving too, having dropped off other children, we assume. And the two main kids are all dressed in white linen as they run happily through the tall grass in slow motion toward a great glowing white tree.
The End.
No, I’m not kidding. That was how it ended.
Donjuanica and I left the theater, and I said, “Oh, I get it. It wasn’t God, it was kindly aliens!” And then I went home to put some ice on my reverse-time-impacted manuals.
So my thoughts in retrospect are these:
- “Knowing” was really a bad rip-off of “Signs,” only not nearly as good and like 10 years late.
- Hollywood production studios have to release something to fill the gap between Christmas and Memorial Day, and they don’t much care what they put out there.
- If kindly aliens decide to help us in real life, I hope they can come up with a better way to do so than by whispering encoded messages into the ears of children who have no hope of understanding them so they can only go insane.
- If said kindly aliens want to take away your children, I wouldn’t think twice before agreeing.
- If said kindly aliens decide to start beating you over the head with religious symbology turned into science fiction, get on a bus or something.
- If said kindly aliens drop your stolen children off on a strange planet with no food or water and no adult supervision and leave them in the care of a glowing white tree in a very over-the-top Adam and Eve metaphor, feel free to scoff loudly so other people in the theater can hear you.
- Signs was cool, Knowing was lame.
The End.