HERE WE go again. It’s the end of the world as we know it, according to the scenario of Knowing, and we are challenged to stay awake and ponder whether or not dour Nicolas Cage can come to the rescue. Just in case anyone is too dim to miss the point, Cage actually delivers an angst-ridden line in which he asks, “How am I supposed to stop the end of the world?”
The yarn begins reasonably promisingly with a prologue set in 1959. At a Massachusetts elementary school, the pupils are invited to contribute drawings for a time capsule that will be buried on the grounds. To the bafflement of her teacher, a shy girl leaves a page with an apparently random succession of numbers.
When the time capsule is opened 50 years later and each of the present-day pupils is given one of the contents, it just happens that the page of numbers is handed to a schoolboy whose father, a morose widower blankly played by Cage, just happens to be an astrophysicist.
Intrigued by the numbers, and blessed with remarkable intuition, Dad inserts dividing lines and notices that the first numbers now read as 9/11/01. Even dim viewers don’t need to be nudged about that discovery.
And so it transpires that all the numbers relate to the dates and locations of disasters that resulted in high body counts, and that three have yet to happen – unless Professor Cage can prevent them.
He and his son live in a remote house on the edge of a forest, which is convenient for supposedly mysterious figures to stand and stare for hours on end. Then there are repeated unsubtle references to how unseasonably warm the weather is for October, prompting the suspicion that there is a hidden agenda that is token green.
Director Alex Proyas, the movie’s Egyptian-born, Australian-raised director, has a predilection for eerie, unsettling tales, as demonstrated with flair in his first two feature films, The Crow and Dark City. He also has an appetite for destruction, which is illustrated with relish in a few impressive effects-driven action sequences that will jolt viewers sunk into a stupor by his inane, solemnly po-faced new movie.
