Anthony Ricardi’s review of “Knowing”
In a nutshell: An astrophysicist deciphers prophecies from half a century ago and attempts to prevent those that have not yet occurred.
This critic has so much said it before… boy, do we miss Irwin Allen. Cheesy and goofy as he was, Mr. Allen could cobble together stars and special effects to give us one entertaining disaster flick (example, “The Towering Inferno”). Entertainment and fun were Irwin’s simple goals, in terms of what he perceived as crowd-pleasing qualities… which brought in the audiences, thus allowing him to meet his own financial goals. Those twin benchmarks have largely been forgotten by today’s filmmakers, especially the fun part.
What we usually are forced to absorb in terms of a modern disaster flick are complex computer graphic scenarios of destruction that are about as involving as watching someone else play a computer game. But this critic would easily take distancing over disgusting, which is the amped-up level of the majority of actual scenes of destruction in our flick this time. The reason this is being mentioned up front is that an urgent, strong warning must be issued to anyone thinking of bringing kids to see this movie… don’t! Suffice to say that the traumas inflicted to human beings include being crushed like insects against a windshield and being burned alive… The images are so brutal that to describe them in detail is impossible, if this critic is to maintain his family-friendly status, that is. Beware!
The film begins with little hint of the horrors to come, at a Massachusetts elementary school in 1959. Wooden desks and polite kids and a truly ambitious school administration add up to a charming ceremony where the children are asked to write or draw their visions of the future that will be placed in a time capsule in front of the school; not to be opened until that fantastic, far-off year of 2009. However, there is one spooky little girl (isn’t there one in every class?) Lucinda Embry (Lara Robinson) who, instead of a crayon rocket ship or something, submits a sheet a paper covered in numbers dictated to her by whispered voices in her head… Cut to “the future” (where are those flying bubble cars we were promised, exactly?) and astrophysicist John Koestler (Nicholas Cage) addressing his class at M.I.T.. John is discussing the nature of the universe (they do stuff like that at M.I.T.) and whether it is random or ordered, chemical reactions or created. John falls under the “stuff happens” theory. We soon realize that this guy is lost and depressed, unable to deal with the death of his wife in a hotel fire. Cage does a terrific job of being depressed throughout the film, to the point of depressing the audience with his one-note performance. He lives for his son, Caleb (Chandler Canterbury) who just so happens to go to that grade school established at the start of the flick. 
At the ceremony where the time capsule is opened the current pupils are each handed one of the papers placed inside a half-century ago. Caleb receives the number-filled page scrawled by Lucinda (who has since passed away). Later John, after a late night booze session, has a revelation while looking at the decades-old digits… they represent, in chronological order, every significant disaster of the last 50 years. Each event not only lists the date it occurred (or will occur) but also the number of fatalities and the GPS coordinates! There are a trio of incidents yet to happen, and John sets out to prevent them. He tracks down Lucinda’s daughter, Diana (Rose Byrne) and Rose’s child, Abby (again, Laura Robinson) and along with Caleb the four eventually form a blended pseudo-familial unit dedicated to finding the ultimate answer.
After a leaden, talk-laden series of improbable events and postulations punctuated by the aforementioned scenes of carnage, the foursome must struggle through nothing less than the chaos spawned by the coming Apocalypse (while being tailed by mysterious entities that project whisper-sounding telepathic messages to the kids), the film becomes an end of the world saga so much like so many (that were more entertaining) that have preceded it in sci-fi history. This critic would easily watch “On The Beach”(which he always considered a bit slow) again, but this one… never. Questions of predestination and the efficacy of such things as the Bible Code are beaten to death and rendered moot by a finale that feels tacked on and reduces Christian iconography to something strongly resembling “Chariots of the Gods” blasphemy. The script wants it all, to be taken seriously as a think piece, an action flick, a supernatural horror flick and a science fiction film. You can see the train wreck (and there is one in here, folks) coming from a long way off (unlike the blasé New Yorkers who are seemingly too cool to move out of the way of an out-of-control juggernaut) as the various and opposing concepts collide. Oh, the humanity!
Having obviously been hacked down to two hours, this debacle still feels at least a half hour too long. Rent it, if you must, but don’t waste any of your precious time watching a missed opportunity such as this in the theater… ’cause you never know just when Earth’s end credits might roll.
By the way, “Pinocchio” is out on DVD and Blu-ray. Enjoy…
Now that’s worth knowing.
Bottom Line: A mishmash of dull clichés and horrific shocks overlaid with pretentious pseudo sci-fi scriptural references guaranteed to bore, brutalize and offend.
Critic’s Rating: D- (for Disaster)
Rated PG-13 (for disaster sequences, disturbing images and brief strong language)
