Tuesday, May 26, 2009

KNOWING

“KNOWING” (Nicolas Cage, Rose Byrne, Chandler Canterbury & Lara Robinson)

When I first heard about this film, I was intrigued by the premise – then the critics ripped it to shreds; citing an absurd religious revelation for making the movie ‘laughable’ – so I stayed away until it came to the ‘cheap’ theatre nearby.
Just to let you know, I didn’t think it was all that bad – I’ve seen dozens of films that I felt I wasted my money on, but this isn’t one of them (especially for $3)
If you’re looking for a ‘religious’ aspect to the story, I can see where you could take it that way, but my complaint would be that it was too predictable. There was only one catch in the ‘climatic’ ending that I didn’t see coming.
The plot - & why I wanted to see this film in the first place – is an interesting one.
It opens in a classroom in 1959 where a grade school teacher tells her class they’re going to draw pictures to be placed in a time capsule for kids going to school in 2009 to see.
Lucinda, the girl who came up with the time capsule idea, writes down nothing but random numbers, filling both sides of the paper – the teacher takes the paper away from her before she can write down the last few numbers – she just has time to scribble the initials E. E. before the page is taken from her. (& she mistakenly writes the E’s backward)
When the time capsule is lowered into the ground, Lucinda comes up missing. Her teacher finds her in a closet in the basement with her fingers covered in blood from scratching away at the door to the closet...
We are then informed we are now in ‘Present Time’ (2009)
Nicolas Cage is a widowed high school science teacher with a young son (Caleb) who hears voices in his head & wears a hearing aid to help silence the voices. It is Caleb’s class that receives the contents of the time capsule from 1959 & to no one’s surprise, he is given Lucinda’s page of scribbled numbers. I guess if you were looking for the religious angle, this would be called ‘divine intervention’.
It only takes Caleb’s dad (John) one perusal of the page to understand its meaning when the numbers 9 11 2001 jump out at him. He goes on the internet & sees the final death toll from that fateful day & then looks back at Lucinda’s numbers; 9112001 is followed by the exact number of casualties. John then looks for other catastrophes & finds that there are dozens of them interspersed throughout the pages - exact dates followed by the exact number of fatalities. There are however other numbers following this information that keeps John’s colleague from buying into Lucinda’s ability to predict the future. When John discovers the meaning of the extra numbers there is no doubt in his mind that Lucinda was unquestionably a modern day Nostadamus & he begins to seek out those who knew her since it was now obvious to him that the last entry was incomplete.
Since I’ve probably revealed too much already, I’ll stop here. If I were to read this review, I’d be very interested to see what happens next – It’s a little silly, but it also throws a couple of curveballs that you don’t see coming. But I really don’t see why anyone would laud this film for the way it ended – Other than I knew what was going to happen with the kids (Caleb & Lucinda’s granddaughter, Abby) I felt if they went in any other direction the story wouldn’t make sense – they at least made the clues presented follow through to an obvious conclusion. Perhaps because I’ve only spent one day at Sunday school in my life, I was unable to understand the deeply religious aspects of the finale, but to me, it was, as my favorite Vulcan would say, “Logical.”

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