Knowing - Review

Saw KNOWING tonight, I know its been out a few weeks but with my asinine position right now I get to see maybe one movie every two weeks compared to the 2 a week when my situation improves. So I consider this a lucky week, 12 Rounds last week and another this week! I’m moving up in the world! Observe and Report is next week and plans are in motion for that to be the next on the theater list. OK, KNOWING, short version, worth seeing particularly if you are a fan of Alex Proyas, the director. This movie is not on the intellectual level with say, Dark City, but is most certainly not the thing Fox turned I, Robot into. But regardless worth seeing.

KNOWING revolves around Caleb and John Koestler, 50 years ago the students of Caleb’s school buried a time capsule and they are about to rip it up out of the ground. Caleb receives one of the envelopes from within the capsule to open and it is a page of numbers. Caleb takes it home with him where his father John finds it and out of curiosity starts “decoding” the numbers. Turn out the numbers reflect a date and number of people dead. After matching all but the last 3 sets off numbers John tries to convince others of what the paper could be. After another of the predictions come true John is determined to save as many lives as he can. All the while mysterious strangers are seemingly stalking Caleb and Abby, the grand-daughter of the little girl who wrote the numbers originally. The question is can John stop the “end of the world” as the numbers suggest or will he be able to keep him self and his family safe?

Well what I got from this film it a bit of a heavy handed sci-fi take on The Rapture described in the bible. That’s one thing I kind of enjoyed is the questions raised about determinism versus free will. Is it fate that all the stars are aligning and this MIT professor with hardcore religious issues due to the death of his wife or a coincidence? I say the film is heavy handed because rather than giving us those issues to continue pondering after we walk out of the theater, we are given the writers idea of the answer. This is also fine because other wise the film would have not had an ending for majority of theater goers to latch onto.

This isn’t really an action film per-se but there are action scenes. These portions of the film work amazingly well despite a very few minor wonky effects shots. The acting is about on par for the film save for a few overacted moments in it. I’d like to point out the kids in particular because so many times I’ve found kids in movies like this really annoying. These kids didn’t get into the annoying range save for a few scenes in the beginning trying to make them out to be precocious, because apparently no movie with kids in it since Dakota Fanning came on the scene, can not be precocious. There are no Jake Lloyd in Phantom Menace bad moments I can assure you however.

So yeah, the bottom line is this is an above average sci-fi flick that takes a little bit of open-mindedness to enjoy. Go see it if it sounds interesting to you but I most certainly cant recommend it to everyone.

Till next time guys.