Knowing
Year:
2009
Directed by:
Alex Proyas
Rated:
PG-13
Country:
United States
Runtime:
2 hrs. 1 min.
Production Company:
Summit Entertainment
Written by:
Ryne Douglas Pearson
Juliet Snowden
Stiles White
Starring:
Nicholas Cage
Chandler Canterbury
Rose Byrne
Lara Robinson
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Mysterious, jolting, and thought-provoking.
Knowing has the ability to evoke dismay, intrigue, wonder, and hope. It is a film with lofty goals and the directorial skills needed to reach them. Its audacity can be off-putting, but its execution is commendable. Many good science fiction movies create suspense or provoke thought. This one does both.
At the unearthing of an elementary school's fifty-year time capsule, MIT professor John Koestler's son, Caleb, receives one of the items contained therein: a page of numbers, written by a young female student in the 1950s. His dad soon finds himself examining the numbers and discovers that they relate the dates, locations, and death tolls of great disasters of the fifty years since it was written. Even more frightening: a few of the dates at the end have not occurred yet. Koestler's presence at one of these disasters confirms that the message was meant for him and Caleb specifically to acquire, but why? And how was that orchestrated? Strange men also begin showing up around Caleb, giving him rocks, showing him visions, and never saying a word. Finally, John, Caleb, and two others find themselves in a doomsday scenario that may mean the end of the world.
This may sound like a "save the world" movie, but it is not. At its center is the question of whether the universe is a series of random or determined events; is there a reason everything happens as it does, or do things just happen to happen? Interestingly, Knowing actually takes a stance on the debate instead of letting us decide things for ourselves, and while that would normally destroy a film's integrity, the type of answer the film provides is intriguing in itself. The answer we get is that things do happen for a reason, but there is a twist: that reason can lie so far outside our understanding of the cosmos that we could never grasp it ourselves. This truth turns out to be a tremendous burden.
Again and again, director Alex Proyas instills the exact emotions he wants us to feel based on the events on screen. There is a plane crash scene that reminds me of many parts of Children of Men. It is one long, uncut shot: Koestler is talking to a police officer about a wreck on the highway. The officer looks up at something behind Koestler, turns and runs. Koestler turns and looks up to see a commercial jet crashing to the ground, clipping several cars on the highway with a wing, and then bursting into flame. Still in the same shot, Koestler runs over to the wreckage, walking around it to see if he can help. All around him people are jumping out of parts of the cabin, burning alive. One group frees themselves from their section of the plane, farther away from the others, and begins running away, only to be engulfed by an explosion. It is incredibly realistic and, therefore, effectively horrifying, and it is one of the movie's chief examples of Proyas' directorial skill.
These moments of suspense and horror play a larger importance in the movie, though. While they keep us interested on a visceral level, they also demonstrate the feeling of being involved in unprecedented cosmic revelations. When Koestler comes into full knowledge of just how precisely determined the world's events are, the sense of dread is overwhelming. If you can't imagine what it would feel like to know when and where deadly catastrophes are going to happen, by the end of this movie, you will understand more than you wished you did.
In a final analysis, the randomness versus determinism debate that lies at Knowing's core functions less as an end than as a means to experiencing the film's more important theme, which -- as its title implies -- is the burden of knowing horrible events that have been determined to happen. During its course we experience a range of emotions that can be upsetting, as the film moves from mystifying you to terrifying you. Perhaps that is the natural process of acquiring great new understandings of the world.
