Shocking

Rating: 7/10 (13 July 2009)

When I first heard about this, I dismissed it as another special effects oriented piece of Hollywood junk, but when I heard that it came from Alex Proyas, the skilled Sci-fi director behind The Crow and Dark City I gave it a shot. Well It's certainly not junk. Up until the ending, Knowing is a well paced, fairly emotional and very startling picture.
The premise is based around one of the greatest scientific controversies, whether the universe is random, or if things happen for a reason. Nicholas Cage is John Koestler, an astrophysicist, a widower and a highly depressed man. On the day of his son's graduation, the school digs up a time capsule buried fifty years ago. Inside are dozens of envelopes containing student's illustrations of what the future would look like. John's son brings home one of the envelopes, but instead of a drawing inside, there is a page full of random numbers. That night John discovers a sequence in the numbers, which reveals a deadly fact. Something with the potential to the whole planet.
From the look of things, It feels like Alex Proyas is desperate to make the biggest natural disaster film of all time. It is certainly one of the most complex. The elaborate plot does not harm the flow of the film too much until the concluding twenty minutes which are visually stunning but ridiculous and quite irrelevant to everything that proceeded it.
The film is absurd yes, but it's darkness was strangely compelling; almost in a Twilight Zone kind of way, Knowing is a film I would recommend if you seek a sci-fi film that is more mystery than action driven.