'Close Encounters' meets 'The Omen' with an overkill Deus Ex ending.

Rating: 6/10 (5 April 2009)

So what you get is young kids pretty convincing in major roles, cutting-edge disaster FX, cool music, and all the right plot buttons pushed at the right moments - until the end. (Also frantic DIY efforts). And mostly until the last sequence it keeps you guessing - is John Koestler (Nic Cage) just succumbing to gross paranoia after his wife's random death? Or is it really and truly The End of the World? What you also get is a lot of high class hokum; for a man cracking up enough to sink a bottle of Scotch every night, Koestler displays amazing resistance to continuously major trauma, and amazing fitness too - but in this it started to strangely remind me of 'Vertigo', as the obsessed, damaged hero (Cage is very like Jimmy Stewart) frantically follows a path at all costs that we hope will lead to some sort of redemption. And it's towards the climax that 'Knowing' starts to fall apart, because those mysterious 'men in black' take a hand. Literally, it's a Deus Ex Machina. 'Knowing' abruptly stops playing games with your head in its previous Hitchcock way, to switch to an over-the-top I, Robot-style FX-fest. Battlestar Galactica eat your heart out, and 9 out of 10 up till then.
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The last worthwhile plot turn is a car smash almost as shocking as the one in 'Adaptation'. And then - bunny rabbits? BUNNY RABBITS? The way the ending plays out is boringly neat and logical in story arc terms (and racist? - I mean, only two WASPS will be saved..?) and after the high drama and twists and turns of the previous 90 minutes it's a complete letdown. And slow. And FX overkill, actually - did they do this just to say 'we can portray the destruction of New York better than anybody before or since'? Because the story we were asked to buy into at the beginning, ie John Koestler's paranoia, grief and issues with his son and our doubt over his sanity, is literally overwhelmed by a sub-Close Encounters meets Armageddon meets Contact running-through-cornfields affair, which I momentarily thought was an Aero Bubbles screensaver kicking in. The bunny rabbits killed it for me. That was Harvey, not Vertigo. 4 out of 10 for the dénouement, which in hindsight makes no sense anyway - after all, why did the aliens choose those kids in particular, or Lucinda 50 years ago? What on Earth made them special? Hollywood demographics, I suppose.