Oh no, it's Indiana Jones 4 all over again...

Rating: 3/10 (31 March 2009)

It's happened again- take a perfectly good premise for a film, and screw it up with a tacked-on ending about aliens. In this case, the trailer made Knowing look like a fast-paced Nicholas Cage action/thriller flick with amazing disasters and a clever plot thrown in, and I was massively excited to see it. However, by the halfway point, I was starting to go 'eh?' and felt like the rest of the audience was with me. Nicholas Cage finds a series of numbers that predict dates and locations of disasters for the past 50 years- this we know from the adverts. What it DOESN'T show you is the random sub-plot about albino men in black suits who hang around his kid and hand out black pebbles. As I'm sure has been said by every other reviewer, the train and plane crash sequences were definitely worth seeing, as is the end of the world sequence and even the forest fire one. However, as has also been said, Nick Cage spends most of the film driving around pointlessly and putting himself in danger whilst staring at the sheet of numbers. I can't fault his acting, there's not much he could have done with this tripe. There seems to be no correlation at all between the strange men in black and the disasters- it's like two films have been forcibly mashed together, in the most boring and unbelievable way possible.
And in the end, Aliens come down and take away his son and his friend's daughter, and randomly transport them to a field with a 'tree of life' or something in it. The kids seem to forget that they have just left behind everyone they know to certain death, and skip around. I'm not sure if the other spaceships were supposed to represent other children being saved too- if it does, it's not clear. Are the kids supposed to be 're-starting the human race'? If so, why is there only two of them? What if one dies before puberty? What if they don't find each other attractive? How did the aliens find out that earth was going to be destroyed, and why do they even care? Why did they hang around being all creepy and haunting the kids? All these questions and more will not be answered if you watch Knowing.
I have strong suspicions that there was a different ending to this movie at first- and that it was a straight foreword but slightly clever disaster flick with amazing special effects, which would have been a great film. But then at some point, someone said 'Hey, you know what made Indiana Jones 4 so rubbish? The aliens randomly slapped onto the end! Let's do the same with this movie!' Oh, and then the world ends and everyone dies. Hows that for a downer, anyone? I actually felt depressed for about half an hour after watching this. Luckily, due to Cineworld Unlimited cards I didn't pay to see this, or I'm sure the depression would have lasted a lot longer.