"Knowing" That You Can't Stop It

Rating: 8/10 (29 March 2009)

It's interesting to think of the extremes of reactions here to KNOWING, ranging from scorn to almost-uncritical praise. But while I'll admit it isn't the most credible science fiction film I've ever seen, even one of its sub-genre, that of the End Of The World, I know of quite a few others like it that are absolute clinkers.
The premise of KNOWING, in that an MIT professor played by Nicolas Cage, has discovered a parchment hidden in a time capsule at his son's school that was buried there fifty years ago with a random set of numbers that foretold of horrors that would befall us between 1959 and 2009, and the ultimate horror that would eliminate the human race, is a brilliant and even frightening one. Indeed, this is a film that involves both science and religion, which often seem to bump into one another both in the reel world and the real world. Cage gets involved because one of the disasters told in that parchment was an apartment fire in Phoenix that killed his wife and eighty others a few years back; and when he comes into contact with the daughter (Rose Byrne) of the disturbed schoolgirl who wrote the parchment, he desperately tries to protect himself, her, and their two children (Chandler Canterbury; Lara Robinson). In the end, however, knowing what the numbers on the parchment mean can only lead to the conclusion that the film gets to eventually--that The End can't be stopped.
Although admittedly imperfect, partly because of some occasionally lame dialog, KNOWING really does manage to merit a lot of scares. Its blend of science fiction and Biblical prophecy was, for me, rather interesting, because it did not totally dismiss the prophecy aspect out of hand, and yet it also avoided the ham-fisted soapbox shouting of the "Left Behind" series. The special effects here, not surprisingly, are quite good, especially the climactic destruction of the world and its rebirth elsewhere in the universe; and the music score by Marco Beltrami interestingly appropriates the ominous Allegretto movement of Beethoven's Symphony No. 7 at a couple of points in the film as a musical prelude to the inevitable.
KNOWING probably won't go down as being among the best science fiction films ever, let alone of the End Of The World variety, but it works well enough, and it has provoked a lot of consideration about the impact of science and religion on the future of humanity.