Movie Review: Knowing

Knowing
Starring Nicholas Cage, Knowing is a sci-fi thriller horror suspense doomsday movie. It does a good job of mixing these genres throughout the movie and I never felt as though it was overreaching at any point, except for the very end. The basic idea is that a time capsule is unearthed after 5 decades and inside the time capsule is a listing of major disasters that have occurred in the interim and of course, a few that have yet to happen! An astrophysicist (Cage) stumbles upon this list and takes it upon himself to keep the remaining disasters from happening.

The visuals in this movie are great, I’ll give it that. The plane thing and the burning forest thing (trying not to give anything away here) are two great scenes and worked very well with all the sound being pumped out in the theater. The story was decent too (with a big exception). When I first half watched the preview, I thought this was a take off of National Treasure or Da Vinci Code. There is a list after all that Cage is trying to decode and follow. But really, this movie stands on its own. While not being completely original, I never felt like I was watching something I had seen before.

Aside from some standard ‘that could only happen in the movies’ moments, I’ve got two big gripes with the movie. The first is Cage. I never knew I didn’t like Nicholas Cage before. I don’t think he did anything in this movie to deserve this, but I just really don’t want to see him in another movie. I feel like his ability to portray different characters isn’t all that great. I felt like the guy I saw in this movie was some sort of amalgam of all the past Cage characters. Perhaps this is the price you pay for being successful and in a bunch of movies over the years, but nevertheless, I think this movie would’ve been better off without him in it. The second gripe I have is the ending. I’ll try to not give anything away here. Basically, you could tell the movie was going where it was going, it was pretty inevitable. That being said, I can’t say I liked the way in which it got there or what it did once it was there.

I really liked this movie for the first three quarters of it. There was a good mix of action, suspense and horror wrapped up in a sci-fi package. But then it veered of in what was probably an inevitable direction and Cage started to wear on me. So in the end, while it was an enjoyable movie, I can’t help but feel it could’ve been a bit better. I gave it a 2.5 (yep, I’ve got halves now!).

See the trailer after the break.

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