nan | 楠木

Knowing is a creepy sci-fi flick from director Alex Proyas, whose previous works include the cult favorite Dark City and the commercially mediocre I, Robot. Knowing displays the same edgy feeling as Dark City, both in terms of visuals and the plot, and therefore is also a film that will probably be adored by a small following but generally disregarded by the masses (and even the critics, judging from its RottenTomatoes score  - Roger Ebert was one of the few who gave it a fresh rating).

What’s good about this film is its great look and feel. There are a few rather spectacular effects sequences, the first of which is a long-take where we follow Nicolas Cage on the scene of a massive disaster. It’s a truly thrilling and chaotic scene. (The later scenes aren’t as effective, although the body-counts are much higher.) And the color hue looks right for the film’s moody ambience. The characters, led by Nicolas Cage’s widowed MIT astrophysicist, are generally convincing.

What’s bad about the film is its plot. (To quickly summarize: Cage is an astrophysicist who finds a string of numbers that predict future disasters… and he therefore tries to prevent them from happening.) At the end of the day, it’s the story that makes or breaks a film, and in the case of Knowing, the cast and crew are working with poor material. While it’s fine for the film to be debating about determinism vs. random theory, in terms of storytelling it is probably not acceptable for the protagonist’s efforts to be wholly useless – indeed, by the film’s climax, the audience is left wondering what the film was all about, if everything was predetermined. There is no relief, or justification, for the protagonist’s hardships, and that’s just bad storytelling.

7/10