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Fifty years ago, a new elementary school in Massachusetts celebrated by burying a time capsule. The students all drew pictures of what they imagined the year 2009 would look like—except for Lucinda Embry (Lara Robinson), who wrote row after row of numbers.
At the school’s fiftieth anniversary celebration, the time capsule is opened, and Caleb Koestler (Chandler Canterbury) is handed the envelope containing Lucinda’s mysterious page of numbers. That night, Caleb’s father, MIT astrophysics professor John Koestler (Nicolas Cage), takes a closer look at Lucinda’s numbers and discovers a series of dates from the last fifty years—all of which ended in some sort of tragedy, including the hotel fire that killed his wife.
With just three dates left on the page, Koestler becomes obsessed with preventing the remaining catastrophes. But as he races off in search of plane crashes and terrorist attacks, Caleb begins hearing voices—just like Lucinda Embry did.
Like his 1998 sci-fi thriller, Dark City, director Alex Proyas’s Knowing is a dark and eerie film with a mystifying story that’s sure to keep you on your toes. Proyas (whose filmography also includes I, Robot and The Crow) is a master of atmosphere. He takes his audience into dark, hidden corners, abandoned buildings, and even the Koestlers’ rundown old house, where strange men silently lurk in the woods out back. And the result is both edge-of-your-seat suspenseful and spine-tinglingly creepy. It’s delightfully disorienting. From those quiet, eerie moments to the horrifying scenes of massive destruction, Proyas gets it just right.
Unfortunately, though, the writing and the acting aren’t exactly solid, and viewers will sometimes find themselves pulled out of the creepiness of the story by a few lines of cheesy dialogue or a few moments of terrible overacting. Nicolas Cage movies have always been a guilty pleasure of mine—because he’s just so darn entertaining. But there are some movies where he just doesn’t fit—and this is one of them. He’s intense but stiff, and he often gets lost in the dialogue. Even Rose Byrne, who plays Lucinda’s daughter, Diana, gets caught up in the overacting. And it’s a shame, too—because the plot itself is intriguing, but the acting is distracting, and the writing feels disjointed, switching from psychological thriller to disaster movie to science-fiction without warning.
With a solid script and a couple of convincing actors, Knowing could have been a haunting and thoughtful thriller. As it is, it’s dark and suspenseful, with an interesting, twisting plot that will give you all kinds of discussion topics for the ride home from the theater. It’s still an entertaining film, but the distractions keep it from being a must-see.
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