Knowing

This is a film I went into completely blind. I knew it couldn’t have had the best reviews of the week, but I hadn’t seen a trailer and didn’t really know anything about it.
First things first. Nic Cage’s hair is very strange in this film. At some point soon he’s going to have to acknowledge it’s receding, because hair cuts like this don’t really, umm, cut it.
To the film. I suppose not knowing what the film’s about is a strength in this instance. We open in 1959 school where there’s a very strange little girl. She’s suggested that their school celebrates its opening by placing a time capsule in the ground. Her classmates all draw pictures of spaceships and robots to bury, but little Lucinda writes two sides of seemingly random numbers. They all get buried.
Flash forward to 2009 and Nic Cage is John, a lecturer at MIT who seems to give quite facile lectures. He also looks at Saturn in his garden with lights all over the place, surely making it really hard to see the night sky. He doesn’t believe in god, and hasn’t talked to his pastor father for an indeterminate period of time. He’s a widower with a son, Caleb (a very biblical name for a non-believer, but then Caleb appears in the Book of Numbers, so that’ll be the reason).
Strange things begin to happen when the time capsule’s opened up and Caleb gets Lucinda’s scribblings. Late at night John spots the date of 11 September, and then manically finds loads of other dates, along with spookily accurate numbers of people who died in each event (are the total fatalities for 9/11 even known that accurately?).
He shows his findings to his cynical physicist friend. It’s all numerology. But there are three dates left, and each date has some more numbers attached which haven’t been decoded.
And so we embark on something that’s not too clear, and feels as though it might have strolled in from an M Night Shyamalan film. There are some strangers who are following Caleb around. He’s seeing strange visions.
The first date arrives and there’s an almighty accident that’s a little too CGI for its own good.
I won’t spoil the film any more as the direction it follows is uncertain, but anyone who’s watched the films of Steven Spielberg should have a good idea where it’s heading before it gets there.
Rose Byrne, seen most recently in Damages, gets an interesting role that doesn’t inevitably become a romance with Cage – Byrne might be 15 years younger than Cage, but that wouldn’t stop such a plot development in any other film.
What can I say about the ending without giving anything away? There’s too much CGI that feels out of step with the rest of the film. I’d have saved the money and gone for something simpler.
The story didn’t hang together well enough, and even when disaster was striking, Cage was seemingly able to stroll around with impunity. When everybody else’s mobile phones were down, Cage’s was up. Having Cage’s character drink from a bottle of whiskey at any given evening was fine, but it wasn’t really followed up. This was no Leaving Las Vegas.
All in all, interesting, but not great. Not terrible, but just OK.


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