There must be something between Nicholas Cage and really, really weird movies: "Snake Eyes," "8MM," "The Wicker Man," "The Weather Man" and now director Alex Proyas' "Knowing." A solid premise, in the film a time capsule buried in the ground for 50 years accurately predicts every disaster over that time period and even a few that haven't happened yet. Naturally, the kid who discovers the meaning of the time capsule is the son of a brilliant MIT astrophysics professor, John Koestler (Nicholas Cage). Chaos, bedlam and far too much CGI ensue. Of course, good premises do not a good movie make.
"Knowing" takes its time setting up the story; in fact, it takes far too much time. And then it sets up the story some more, followed by a few seconds of dazzling special effects and then more middling story-telling.
The incredibly strange plot almost single-handedly ruins the film. Suffice it to say "Knowing" is like no other disaster flick or precognitive mystery. Proyas starts throwing curve balls - or more accurately, lobbing the ball blind and allowing a plot that could be a heart-pounding mystery to instead become something straight out of a sci-fi nut's bible.
In a phone interview with The Eagle, Proyas said the film was not really a disaster flick. "I see this movie as a spiritual quest and there's a lot of mayhem and disasters that ensue on an escalating scale, but it's not really about the disasters," he said, adding that it was more of a generational story focusing on the father-son bond.
To fulfill that quest, the film is chalked full of supposedly tender moments and numerous references to biblical myth, prophecy and a good deal of questions of free will. In theory such musing is all well and good, but in practice the film is simply too long. Scenes that should be half as long (if they weren't cut out entirely) drag on forever, often ruining what shock and awe or universality the film's sparse good moments manage to achieve.
Proyas described the sci-fi genre to which "Knowing" very loosely belongs as his comfort zone. "I think as much as I enjoy fantasy films from my own personal perspective, science fiction is often a little bit more grounded in the rules of the real world and I kind of like the sort of confines of that world," he said. Unfortunately, the film is both too rooted in lengthy and incredibly boring scientific extrapolation and more than a few moments that just don't make any sense, brushed under the rug in favor of something neither scientific nor sensible.
Whereas other films tend to glamorize disaster, Proyas said his aim was to make the film's disasters believable. "I really wanted to make them as visceral and as real and as unsettling as possible and that was really my premise," he said. The disasters of the film are few and far between and last for a matter of seconds. As visually appealing as the flames are, they are clearly computer generated and thus instantly disconnect audiences from the quest they're supposedly on.
Proyas tried to do as little planning of the shot sequences beforehand as possible, "taking off the safety net." "It pushed me in a new direction and it really created a sort of a slightly different style, perhaps for what I usually do," he said of the film he describes as a suspense thriller. "And suspense, you know, drives the movie forward," he said. Unfortunately for Proyas, very little of the film manages to achieve actual suspense, while the bulk manages only to be drawn out and confusing.
The only reason you have any difficulty seeing where the plot is going is because you assume that surely, there must be a much better explanation than what you think will be revealed. There isn't.
When asked what he hopes audiences will take away from the film, Proyas said he hoped people would get the emotions of it. "It's about... Nick's quest for meaning, his character's quest for meaning," he said. "And he's discovered that perhaps the universe has meaning and it's not just a meaningless random sequence of events, that's the big arch of the story." He also said that the film is about what is passed down through generations. The film has little chance of surviving that transition, as the few plot elements that should have been the focal point for the movie were brushed aside for frightened glances and nonsense.
You can reach this writer at thescene@theeagleonline.com.
