Monday, July 20, 2009

Knowing (2009) PG13 - 3½ Stars

This movie had me really going until the ending. Perhaps, a better ending would have been to show Earth, accepting the disaster thrown upon it, while "knowing," that life will still exist some day. I felt it somewhat presumptuous on the writers part taking into consideration only one religion of the world. But having said all that, I think Cage was at one of his better moments in time with this movie. Plenty of special effects and the action scenes and the airplane crash is pretty awesome. So much so, I backed up one part up about 4 times to see it over again. Granted there are a lot of things that happen in this movie that couldn't possibly really happen, but I love the concept and would have given it 4 stars if it didn't end so bad.

It's Massachusetts, 1959, and the newly constructed William Dawes Elementary School is having a ceremony to mark the occasion. Miss Taylor (Danielle Carter), and her class of young students, have been chosen to draw pictures of what they think the future will look like. Most of the students draw pictures of space ships and robots and fantasy worlds. But one young girl Lucinda (Lara Robinson), spends the entire assignment scribbling the front and back page of her imagery with a series of numbers. The class drawings are then placed in envelopes with the name of the student who drew it printed on the front. Now these images have been consumed into the time capsule where future generations of young students will unlock them, 50 years from now.

Professor John Koestler (Nicolas Cage), lives alone with his young son Caleb (Chandler Canterbury). Caleb's mother was killed from smoke inhalation in a hotel fire, two years prior making John overly protective on what he allows his young son to do. While he and Caleb attend the ceremony of the opening of the time capsule, Caleb is given the drawing Lucinda, made 50 years ago. At dinner, Professor Koestler sees the paper, wondering what the numbers represent. As he studies it closer, he notices amazing coincidence between certain numbers and certain disasters that have happened over the last 50 years. Next to each date, lays also the number of lives lost from each particular tragedy. The more his obsession grows over cracking this seeming decoded message, the farther his beliefs show him Lucinda was predicting the future. With the last three dates showing disasters yet to have happened, he feels he must try and intervene where ever possible to prevent the codes from harming his son.

Escape Artists, Kaplan/Perrone Entertainment
Director: Alex Proyas
Writers: Ryne Pearson, Stuart Hazeldine, Juliet Snowden
Producers: Steve Tisch, Alex Proyas, Jason Blumenthal
I viewed 7/09

1 comment:

Randy Hartzler said...

I thought this was a excellent movie until the ending. As your review said they are being presumptious and being one sided when it comes to Adam and Eve and creation. I sat with my girlfriend and we did the same when it came to the airplane scene. It was wonderful special effects. I thought the idea for the movie was fantastic but the ending was a huge let down.

Rander Rick