Pan on Knowing

[akirlu]

On the other hand, Knowing, the SF/Suspense/Thriller with Nicholas Cage, was deeply disappointing. Hal and I saw it at the local cheap theater, owing in part to having recently watched Next (also a genre film with Nick Cage) and found it surprisingly clever and free of gaping plot holes, and also owing to a lone positive review by Roger Ebert, and his inexplicable likening of the film to Alex Proyas's earlier film, Dark City.



Set up: a crazy-seeming little girl in a 50s elementary school on the cusp of interring a time capsule sees weird pale people who put numbers in her head so she obsessively writes them all down on her one contribution to the time capsule and, when she isn't allowed to finish, goes off to hide in a basement closet and write the last few numbers in blood. Creepy.

Flash forward to the present, where Nick Cage is a widowed Astronomy professor raising his son in a creepy old house in the middle of nowhere convenient to a quick commute to Boston where he teaches at MIT, although apparently an alternate Earth MIT where the students need remedial high-school level astronomy classes. Nick's kid gets the creepy numbers note when the time capsule is opened, more weird pale people appear, primarily to Nick's kid, and Nick figures out that all the numbers are dates of disasters that have happened since 1958 and imply future disasters as well. Cue running around trying to figure out where the next disaster will happen, ignoring his kid, accosting friends and strangers and generally acting like a crazy person. You know, the obligatory schtick in a scary movie, once you have become the receptacle of arcane knowledge that No One Believes.

Eventually we find that the whole world is ending due to a solar flare, everyone is gonna die, there's nothing Cage can do, but it's okay because the Aliens (which is of course what those weird pale people turn out to be) are gonna airlift a lucky few kids to a golden, Edenic planet where they will all re-boot the human race from zero. Oh, and Nick has a touching renewal of faith moment with his formerly estranged pastor father just before the heat wave from the solar flare incinerates everyone. The end.

What we have here is a gigantic bundle of cliches, and to no actual purpose. I mean the movie doesn't have to happen at all if these incredibly sophisticated aliens could just learn to communicate in a way that's less abstruse and indirect than a list of dates and places that Bad Stuff will happen. And given that they can manage to communicate to all these other kids besides the 50s crazy by more direct means by the end of the movie(hence the kids all knowing where to go and why and all that for the air lift), what earthly point was there to giving out the list of upcoming disasters to put in the time capsule, given that all it could ultimately do is torture some future person or persons with the knowledge that they're all gonna die on a particular date. WTF? Some kind of cosmic puzzle-wonk Neener-Neener? And really, with a gap of 50 years and all this jazzy space technology that the Aliens appear to have, couldn't they have come up with some scheme to communicate more clearly to the human race much earlier, so that more people could be airlifted to the Conveniently Earthlike But Unpopulated planet, rather than just the kids at the Very Last Possible Moment? The only real reason for doing it that way was so the writer or director could get the sweet, sparkly, Adam & Eve Under A Tree final shot, and couldn't come up with a better way to justify it. Epic dumbness.

But the dumbness was pretty well everywhere in the film. This is a film where virtually every scene and action is enacted for the benefit of the audience, rather than by any plausible internal logic or knowledge of human behavior. The lecture Cage's character delivers early on to his MIT students on determinism versus randomness would have embarrassed a philosophy freshman to give, and is not the sort of talk that MIT professors give in freaking astronomy classes, even if they gave astronomy classes at the high school or even Jr. high level, which is essentially what's being portrayed.

And Cage and his son living in the Obligatory Scary House in The Woods, which would be located where, exactly, that's within commuting distance of MIT and whatever active telescope facility he's supposed to be at within driving distance of the Boston metroplex?

And Cage running around brandishing a gun after it's been demonstrated to have no useful effect anyway? He's supposed to be a really smart guy, so why is he acting like he doesn't believe in basic empirical evidence? There was more, but after a while it gets painful to remember.

Now, Next on the other other hand, was actually a clever, engaging, and well-made piece of genre work, and if you can catch it on cable or Netflix or whatever, by all means do.

Comments

[lauradi7.livejournal.com]

http://www.haystack.mit.edu/site/directions.html

Entirely possible to find a scary house in the woods in the greater Boston area.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Perhaps, but the sort of isolated forest-primeval-harboring-bears-and-wolves type of woods portrayed in the film are not really typical of the eastern seaboard generally, simply because the area has been domesticated for rather a long time, by US standards. It's really not plausible. And, more to the point, desperately cliché.

[lauradi7.livejournal.com]

The interesting thing about that is that it's becoming *more* true than it has been for a while. I live in Lexington, definitely a suburb, not far out, (close enough that I have an astronomer friend who commutes to MIT on his bicycle sometimes) but in town we have wild turkeys and the occasional deer and coyote, and it's probably just a matter of time before more fairy-tale like creatures move in. No forest primeval around here, though - we have a surprising amount of woods, but the colonial folks chopped down all the old forests, so the ones we have now are less than 200 years old.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Yes, you do get wild resurgence, especially in places where cultivated land is being allowed to go fallow again. In your case, I'd say the turkeys are the impressive bit. Deer and coyotes are perfectly contented suburban dwellers in my experience, and in the case of coyotes, perfectly contented urban dwellers as well. Wild turkeys, I've only seen in fairly remote spots. (Then again, I've spent most of my life in places that are outside the ranges of wild turkies, so it may have just been the fact that we were in Montana.)

[ckd]

For several years (looks like he arrived in 2003 and left in 2008) there was a wild turkey known as "Mr. Gobbles" living in the decidedly non-suburban Kendall Square. (Admittedly the DOT office building has a fair amount of green space around it, but still.) He got moved to a wildlife refuge after being hit by a car crossing the street to go to Starbucks. (Okay, maybe he wasn't going to Starbucks, but that is what was across the street....)

[dhole.livejournal.com]

I've sen wild turkey in Fort Tryon Park, so they do show up in Manhattan.

[stevegreen.livejournal.com]

Weirder still: your and fluid69's reviews of this film are next to each other in my "friends" stream.

I hated the second half of Knowing, as it became increasingly obvious the makers had no real idea where to go with the Twilight Zone premise and prefered instead to cop out with a deus ex machina finale in which ayran angels tempt young children into the woods by offering them fluffy bunnies. I felt like throwing my shoe at the screen.