10 pounds of movie in a 5 pound bag

Rating: Null/10 (25 August 2011)

"Knowing" presents a little more than the average matinée audience member bargained for when they arrived for "Deep Impact", "2012", "Armageddon", "The Day After Tomorrow", etc. action. Is the universe deterministic or random, can a prediction be thwarted and still be called correct, what if you knew what was going to happen and no one believed you? Writers Ryne Douglas Pearson and Juliet Snowden jam these and more question into the story of an MIT scientist and the numeric code that conveniently falls into his hands. If the writers have an ambitious agenda they are slackers compared to Alex Proyas who throws in one thematic element after another. Beyond the mystery of the code and its predictions and Nick Cage's character's grief over his deceased wife and subsequent alcoholism, there are aliens and maybe ghosts and government agents and a whole lot of whispering. Eventually the subplots and complicated mythos overwhelm the plot into something harder to follow than the old sci-fi film version of "Dune". Cage, who is far more at home as a the disturbed genius character than all of the action figure jobs he consistently lands does his best in their subplot soup but gets little support for a most forgettable support cast. In short, fans of watching stuff get blowed up really good get their money's worth but others should look elsewhere.