Let Me. Tell You. About "Knowing".

What happens when your lungs give out from laughing?

So Nicolas Cage is now a part of my life, like a third arm that I never asked for. Not a fully-functioning arm, though: just a shriveled-up, freaky, clawed baby hand that juts out of my back at an awkward angle and makes it uncomfortable for me to sit down. I’ve committed myself to watching at least one Cage movie a week until I’ve seen them all, and last week I watched the fabulous Con Air. Sadly, I didn’t review it, though I should have. I will revisit it again at the end of my journey. Today I watched Knowing. From now on, I’m going to do reviews as I watch every single one of Nicolas Cage's films, because those who haven’t seen his movies need to know the joy that they stand to provide.

This...is Knowing.

 

In 1959, the “weird girl” in a class of elementary school students (named Lucinda) hears the voices of, you guessed it, aliens. (I knew it from like, 5 minutes in, so no spoilers here). In honor of her school’s commemoration or something, Lucinda suggests that everyone in the class draw a picture to put into a time capsule to be opened in 50 years. She, of course, writes out the aliens’ message, which is a list of dates, coordinates, and the number of deaths for all of the disasters that are going to happen within the next 50 years. Her teacher puts her paper into the time capsule anyway, and that’s that.

Cut to 50 years later, and Nicolas Cage is hanging out with his son at their house in the woods. Cage plays some physicist named John who works at MIT and is depressed because he’s given up hope that there’s purpose in life ever since his wife died and he didn’t “know something was wrong” when she was burning to death. His deadpan, no-personality son, Caleb, is played by a sub-par child actor who exhibits the true extent of his talent within the first twenty minutes of the movie by ironically asking Cage’s character if he’s deaf when Cage asks Caleb when he was going to tell him that he’s decided to become a vegetarian. (It’s ironic because Caleb wears a hearing aid. But you don’t know that for a few more minutes).

Anyway, Cage is the most important part of this movie, so. He works too much, he’s the typical brooding, overworked single dad who’s hung up on the death of his wife (as evidenced by his sudden and creepy staring off into space in the midst of a lecture that he’s giving). His professor-buddy keeps trying to hook him up with new women, but Cage is having none of it. While in the midst of a conversation with his friend, Cage remembers that he’s missing the ceremony that celebrates the 50-year anniversary of the elementary school from the opening sequence. This is important because his son goes to this elementary school and they’re unearthing the time capsule that day.

Caleb of course gets the envelope that has Lucinda’s message in it, and he takes it home against the wishes of the school officials. Cage finds it and tells Caleb that he needs to take it back the next day, but then he gets drunk and while he’s cleaning up a spill that he’s made, he notices the following sequence of numbers:

911012996

Which he links to September 11th and the 2996 deaths that occurred on that day. He spends all night in a drunken fury, finding more and more disasters and death tolls, and the next day he shows his work buddy the paper, discredited by the fact that there are gaps full of numbers that he can’t yet explain. However, Cage quickly discovers the meaning of the remaining numbers when his GPS shows the coordinates of his location on the day that the next sequential event is supposed to take place. It’s a plane crash that happens in terrible CGI and of course the predicted 81 people die.

Meanwhile, Caleb is visited by strange men with white hair who don’t speak and make his hearing aid buzz. Cage, instead of shooting them, plays the clueless dad who just lets these things keep happening. One of the best encounters between Caleb and the strangers happens in his bedroom, when one of them shows him a vision of the world outside his window on fire (the CGI of the forest animals all aflame and flipping shit is absolutely beautiful, and by beautiful I mean hilarious). After that encounter, Cage runs outside with a flashlight and a baseball bat in hand, screaming and shooting the beam of light everywhere imaginable. He asks the strangers if they “want some of this”, he hits a tree with the bat, and then goes back inside.

Anyway. Cage starts to stalk Lucinda’s daughter, Diana, and granddaughter, Abby, when he learns that she’s died recently, and when confronted with the information that her mother left behind, Diana discredits Cage and runs away, until a huge subway accident happens in Manhattan that Cage warned her would occur. When Cage gets home after the subway incident, Diana is at his house with her daughter and she tells him about a house that Lucinda had built in the woods to “get ready”. Cage, Diana, and their children go into the woods to the house, and Diana points out that at the end of the list of numbers that Lucinda had written, there are two letters written backwards instead of the usual death toll: “EE”. While in the house (and while the kids are still in the car!!!), Cage and Diana discover that EE means “Everyone Else”. Caleb and Abby, meanwhile, are almost kidnapped by the strangers. Cage continues to be clueless. He follows one of the strangers into the woods and it pulls some ridiculous X-Files shit on him by opening its mouth and blinding him with a flash of light. That’s about it, though.

Yadda yadda, Cage discovers that there’s going to be a huge solar flare the following day, he calls his father to warn him to get underground but he doesn’t listen, Diana goes crazy and takes the kids to try to hide in caves, Cage flips out on the phone and screams that THE CAVES WON’T SAVE US!!!, the strangers kidnap the kids, Diana dies because she’s an idiot. Cage follows the final sequence of coordinates back to the woods to Lucinda’s house, and the kids are there with the strangers, who are—no surprise—aliens. They want to take the kids to repopulate a new planet with humans (why? It isn’t explained), but Cage must stay behind.

It would have been awesome if the movie had just ended after Caleb and Abby are taken aboard the spaceship, because Cage just falls down into this mass of rocks and sobs until he falls asleep, but there’s a brief sequence of him driving through an apocalyptic city to get to his parents’ house, where he hugs them and his sister before THE ENTIRE FUCKING WORLD CATCHES ON FIRE.

Yeah, that’s right. Everyone fucking dies.

Cut to some shitty CGI world reminiscent of the top of the moon in Majora’s Mask, where Caleb and Abby are living carefree and happy as the last two humans in the world.

So.

Knowing is every bit as atrocious as I was expecting it to be. Maybe even more so. But the sad part is, Cage was actually trying pretty hard. I mean, he was his regular goofy self in this movie, but he did a good job in his role. I could tell he was actually depressed about how shitty this movie was. It was very convincing.

Like I said, if it had ended before the “end of the world” sequence, it would have been so much more satisfying. Instead, it pulled an “I’M NOT AN M. NIGHT SHYAMALAN MOVIE”, and it showed us a bunch of bullshit that was just thrown in there to use up the bulk of their CGI budget (which they should have just spent on earlier sequences to make them less shitty). The story was bad, the acting was bad (except for Cage, though he was probably just the best of the worst), and the CGI was bad. The music was horrible, except for the classical piece that played recurringly throughout the film.

I’m going to have to give this one two prophecies out of five. Sorry, Cage, but this is no national treasure.