Thoughtful, Intense and Intelligent, But Still Emotionally Satisfying.

Rating: 10/10 (2 July 2009)

The biggest surprise about Knowing is the fact I liked it a lot. Because a film containing prognostications of major disasters, coupled with science fiction and horror elements and leavened with unsubtle religious allegory is generally the kind of film I would avoid like a dose of the clap.
Except for the major disaster part, this does not sound like my kind of movie. Especially since the main character, a grieving MIT professor is played by the ever-eccentric Nicholas Cage.
Yet I believed he was smart enough to teach at MIT and that he was devastated by the recent death of his wife in a hotel fire and that he is now struggling with the challenges of raising his young son as a widower.
Knowing begins in 1959 at an elementary school about to bury a time capsule slated to be opened fifty years hence. All the kids are asked to draw a picture of what the year 2009 will look like and among the various drawings of space ships, jet packs and rocket cars, one creepy little girl named Lucinda (Lara Robinson) writes out a list of numbers, filling an entire page.
Fifty years later, in 2009, the time capsule is opened and John Koestler's son Caleb (Chandler Canterbury) finds himself in possession of the paper with the numbers on it whose meaning is a puzzlement to all.
Later that night, as a drunken Koestler looks at the numbers a little closer, he makes tenuous sense out of this grouping – 911012996 – which, if you put in the right dividing punctuation, looks like 9/11/01–2,996 or, September 11, 2001 with the 2,996 being the official death toll for that horrible day.
With this key in mind, the meaning of the "random" numbers now pops out like a revealed text. These numbers correspond to the dates of major disasters since 1959 including everything from Chernobyl to Lockerbie.
Even more frightening, at the end of the page, there are numbers for future dates; and I mean dates only a few days away. John is stuck with a dilemma, he believes he has foreknowledge about the date, location and death toll for some future disaster.
Naturally, his family and MIT colleagues discount his theories. It seems John Koestler has truly become a male Cassandra; cursed with an ability to see into the future, but with a complete inability to get anyone to believe him.
We get a taste of what this means when John is speaking with a highway patrolman while stuck in traffic, when suddenly, an airliner in trouble comes whizzing in low and crashes in the field next to the Interstate.
Later, another disaster is seemingly confirmed by this paper when John is witness to a particularly horrible subway crash that he was equally helpless to prevent. Yet, while all of this is happening, there is another subplot showing some strange humanoid figures that always seem to be in the background behind John and Caleb.
Caleb also has haunting visions of the Earth in flames and this coincides with an unusual amount of solar flare activity and Knowing seems to be implying that we are quickly approaching the end of the world as we know it.
I recognize that this becomes a tough pill to swallow for many people who have been enjoying the thrill ride that Knowing is giving them. It means you now have to shift your narrative perspective to include a larger and more all-encompassing ontological philosophy. I would normally be troubled by this shift in a film's point of view, yet Knowing adroitly manages to show us the more fantastic narrative elements at the same time as the Nicholas Cage character John Koestler experiences them.
So, as John Koestler began to grasp the larger dimensions of what was happening to him and to realize that it didn't comport to his current notions of reality, Koestler had to make a philosophical shift and I made the intellectual leap along with him.
Like John Koestler, I didn't fully understand exactly how the bizarre things that were happening were actually happening, but I could not deny the reality of them happening.
So, when it came time for John to say his final goodbye to Caleb, I was wracked with tears because I knew young Caleb had to leave with these aliens who, while scary at the start of Knowing, have since become the benevolent saviors of humankind.
If my last few paragraphs seem like I am talking about a different movie than Knowing, I understand your confusion. All I can say is that Knowing tries one of the most risky and difficult gambits for any movie, it undergoes a complete shift in tone and story, but it works here.
I have no doubt there will be people offended by the plot convolutions and semi-religious imagery that mark the denouement of Knowing. But in my lifetime of movie going, I have frequently found that some of the most memorable films to me personally are the ones I can't easily categorize.
Knowing crosses several film genres and will probably displease the die-hard fans in each of them. Sci-Fi lovers will find it too much like a thriller. Thriller lovers will find it too much like a horror film. Horror lovers will find it too scientific. Scientifically minded people will find it too religious and religious people will hate it because it doesn't exclusively promote whatever religion it is they believe in and to top it off, the whole thing reeks of crappy New Age ideology.
Still, I found Knowing to be a compelling, visually stunning, dramatically interesting and narratively challenging film and I was totally taken to a different world created by film-making professionals who clearly knew what they were doing.
And that is an all too rare experience at the movies today.