Knowing, DVD Review

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It’s difficult to put a genre to Alex Proyas latest film ‘Knowing’. Disaster movie, drams, thriller, science fiction, they’re all in there somewhere, what it certainly is, is different.

In 1959 a class of young children are asked to come up with an idea to mark the opening of their new school. One girl, Lucinda, a bit of a loner, comes up with the winning idea, to bury a time capsule containing pictures drawn by them of what they think the world will look like in 50 years time. The children paint the expected pictures of rockets and robots. All except for Lucinda. Lucinda hears whispering voices in her head and they tell her to write down a massive sequence of numbers. She frantically writes but runs out of time just short of the final few numbers. The teacher is surprised by Lucinda’s contribution but includes it in the capsule anyway. Later that day, after the capsule has been buried, Lucinda goes missing. A search party is raised and the grounds of the school are thoroughly searched. The teacher finds Lucinda in a cupboard under the stairs having frantically scratched the final numbers into the door with her fingers until they bled.

Shoot forwards 50 years and John Koestler (Nicolas Cage) is a professor of astrophysics at MIT. He’s a widower, with a young son, who lost his wife recently in a hotel fire. His son, Caleb, attends the same school where the time capsule was buried and the 50 year ceremony is about to take place. When the enveloped from inside the capsule are distributed amongst the present day children, Caleb gets Lucinda’s envelope. That night John absent-mindedly puts his glass of scotch (he drinks a bit too much in the evenings these days) down on the page of numbers. Glancing at the numbers contained within the glass ring he notices a sequence that piques his interest (91120012996). Being an astrophysicist he sees the numbers as a puzzle to be solved. Pretty quickly he manages to break the numbers down into a date, 09/11/01, the date of the 9/11 terror strike in New York. After googling 9/11 he also finds out that there were 2996 deaths that day.

In a rather intense night for John he manages to find dates and numbers of deaths for pretty much every major disaster for the last 50 years, all predicted in this sheet of numbers. Not all of the numbers form the date and number of dead though, some don’t seem to mean anything at all. John tries to convince a colleague of what he’s found and while he thinks it’s a bit creepy he’s not totally convinced. John then tells him that not all of the events are in the past. One string of numbers says that 81 deaths will occur somewhere the following day. Come the next day and John is stuck in a traffic jam, in a storm, going to pick his son up from school. Glancing at his sat nav he notices a sequence of numbers that describe his longitude and latitude. He then realises that the unexplained numbers on the sheet are in fact the location of the disaster. Looking at the location for today’s predicted event he notices that it’s at the exact same location that he’s currently at! While up ahead there’s been an accident  up ahead it isn’t bad enough for 81 deaths. Just then a passenger plane comes hurtling out of the sky having been struck by lightening, narrowly missing John and crashing in the next field. Sure enough, 81 people died in the crash.

Scientist that he is John has to try and find an explanation for these numbers and why they came to be in his possession. He tries to track down Lucinda, only to find she died of a drugs overdose a few years before. The next best thing is her daughter, Diana. Initially Diana wants nothing to do with John, telling him that her mother told her that she heard voices and that they told her terrible things. It’s not something that Diana remembers fondly and wants to put behind her, and not expose her own daughter, Abby to either. In desperation John makes another prediction to Diana from her mothers numbers, that the following day 191 people would die in New York, but Diana refuses to listen.

John seems compelled to try and stop the upcoming event and so phones through a warning to the authorities. On the news was a threat of a bomb in New York, so John assumes that’s the event and that it’ll happen at the location predicted. Just in case the authorities don’t act he heads to New York anyway, only to find that his tip off wasn’t acted upon and the local police think he’s a suspect and chase him into the subway, where the real event, a train crash happens with John too close for comfort.

When he returns home he finds Diana and Abby at his house waiting for him. They’d seen the news of the accident in New York and she’d realised that her Mother was telling the truth and wasn’t crazy. John then explains that the last sequence of numbers is incomplete, the location isn’t present. Diana also notices that what seem like the last numbers, 33, are in fact EE written backwards.

Things aren’t quite as straight forward as they seem however. This isn’t just a disaster movie, there’s something more sinister at work here. Strange men pull up to the house in a car and, without saying a word, give his son a black stone. It turns out that Caleb and Abby can both, from time to time, hear the whispering voices that Lucinda could. John needs to find out what’s behind all of this, why did he get the numbers if he can’t stop the events from happening? How is his son linked to all of this? John and Diana head to the remote portable trailer that was the last home of her mother. There, scratched into the bottom of her bed they find that EE actually stands for Everyone Else. The last sequence of numbers is actually predicting the end of the world! Is this the one that John is supposed to stop? What do the sinister silent men want with the children? I’m afraid I can’t say any more ‘cause that’d just give it all away.

I have to admit that from the trailers I’d seen for the film, I thought it was a pretty standard disaster flick with a bit of weirdness thrown in with the list of numbers. In actual fact there’s a lot more weirdness here than you at first think. At first it’s subtle, but throughout the film it gains pace until there’s a dark and sinister thread to the film that takes it into a different genre. Personally I found this quite refreshing, this isn’t the usual Hollywood fare offered up to us 9.9 times out of 10, this film dares to be different and while the ending has to be seen to be believed (and has been highly criticised) again, I admired it for its bravery.

There is a sombre tone to the film throughout. Nicolas Cage doesn’t play a happy man. A man that’s just become a single father through the death of his wife, it’s lead him to question everything he believed about how the universe works. The cast throughout are very good, I’m a bit of a fan of Mr Cage and while I can’t quite see him as an MIT astrophysicist, he pulls of the rest of the character rather well. Rose Byrne is also excellent as Diana, there’s quite a realistic interaction between her character and Cage’s, thankfully Alex Proyas kept it straight and didn’t try and introduce a romantic angle to their relationship, that wouldn’t have been right at all.

The cinematography is also quite dark throughout the film, there’s a real sense of foreboding that increases throughout the film as things start to become more sinister. The picture quality of the DVD is excellent upscaled on my 37” LCD and while for long stretches of the film the Dolby Digital 5.1 track has little to do but dialogue (which it does very well though), when it is called into action during the more intense scenes it does so with aplomb. There are a few nice surround effects in there as well, but again, they’re only during the action sequences which are few and far between.

Overall I thought it was well worth a watch. I can’t say that I came away from it with the usual Hollywood feel good feeling, but that’s part of it’s charm, it doesn’t take the usual Hollywood formula but instead decides to tread some new ground and good on it for trying. It’s flawed in a couple of areas, the significance of certain things doesn’t come across well and other things aren’t really explained, but I guess it just leaves you to use your own imagination and come up with those explanations yourself.

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