"Knowing" 2009

First off this is my first reveiew - hope you find it interesting, it just so happend this was a film I currently had on LoveFilm

So here we have another film with Nicolas Cage with a ridiculous plot, featuring another ominous film title. After films like Next, Ghostrider and the terrible re-make of Wickerman, I really haven’t got high hopes.

So we come to the plot; a time capsule, filled with drawings made by elementary children, is dug up after 50years of being underground. One of these drawings is discovered by Professor John Koestler, isn’t your average robot or spaceship, but is a series of numbers correctly predicting every major disaster to happen over the last 50 years, and there are predictions that more are to come. Armed with this knowledge, can Koestler prevent these future disasters from happening?

To be honest, the whole premise of this film failed to excite me, a school girl scribbles some numbers down and it just so happens that they predict the future? Right, I see, it sounds almost as bad as a film about someone who can see two minutes into the future with no explanation what-so-ever. Despite my premonitions of this film, I remained open minded and professional (*cough*) at the opening of this film, so I could deliver an honest review of it.

So, what did I think? In all honesty when those closing credits rolled my initial thought was “Wow!”, and not in a “Wow, could that have been any worse?” way that I predicted, but a “Wow, that was surprisingly really good” kind of a way. From the opening scene’s set in 1959, it’s clear that this wasn’t going to be another one of those terribly cheesy cliché movies, which Cage has seemed to pick up recently, but a different type of movie all together. The cinematography, the score and the performances set a dark and disturbing tone form the very beginning. From a personal point of view any film with slightly eerie children in, freaks the hell out of me, and this is no exception.

The film quickly gets going, and once the discovery of what the numbers all mean is made, there really isn’t any time for breath. The lighting the sound and the music in this film really makes this feel like a mixture of a horror/sci-fi film, and that, with an ounce of special effects, (including a spectacular 2-3 minute scene where we see a plane crash and Cage running to save the burning victims, all in one shot!) we really are given a thrill from start to finish.

With the films themes, of faith vs science, being presented with just enough emphasis to not seem like an annoying lecture, we are left asking the right kind of questions once the film ends. “Is there such thing as fate, or is life and creation just a series of random events?”

So surprisingly I’ve been left with hardly any criticism of this film at all. I think it’s biggest problem is the misconception which will come with this film, it could easily be dismissed as another film with Nicolas Cage, with another ridiculous plot, so audiences may not even want to see the film in the first place – I almost dismissed it myself. Granted it does have a seemingly ridiculous plot, but give it a chance, you may think that it looks like another ludicrous film, but you don’t know and “Knowing is Everything.”

Overall a strong 8 out of 10.