Knowing falls short of sci-fi success

Knowing isn't as much of a thriller as it has unfortunately been advertised as. However, it is a decent tribute and return to the themes of the 1950s science fiction movies.

John Koestler (Nicolas Cage), the hero of the movie, is a scientist-hero of the type found in classics like Earth vs. the Flying Saucers and The Day the Earth Stood Still. His field of expertise is never quite made clear. He teaches at MIT, apparently about topics of causation and random events as well as the illusion of fate. He seems also quite knowledgeable about the physics of solar flares.

The movie begins in an elementary school classroom in 1959. A time capsule is being prepared to be opened 50 years later and all the students are drawing pictures of robots and spaceships and other visions of the future to be folded up and put into the capsule. One girl, however, uncontrollably writes numbers on both sides of a sheet of paper.

Present day, the capsule is opened and the envelopes are passed out to the students of the school. Naturally, John's son ends up with the girl's mysterious sheet of numbers. John takes a look at it and uses his scientific knowledge to decipher the hidden meaning of the numbers. The numbers have predicted disasters between 1959 and the present day that have caused many deaths, including the one that killed his own wife. This causes him so much anguish that his colleague at MIT is convinced that our hero has gone funny in the head (as any reasonable person would).

But our hero has made up his mind, and his opinion will not be shifted. He realizes that a few of the disasters haven't occurred yet and struggles to discover what they will be. As all good scientist-heroes must do, he tries to find a way to prevent them from happening.

This occupies about the first third of the film. Then the movie gets on with what the trailers have promised and what the audience has been expecting: horrible disasters and dashing heroics.

The important thing for a suspense movie is that someone's life must be in jeopardy. There must be a sense that one of the main characters is in genuine peril and that his or her life could be snuffed out at random, without any warning at all. That never really happens in this movie. It is obvious that Cage's character will make it through the end, since he is the hero, and the only other people to die are people whose deaths have been foretold. Most of these people are extras anyway, so the audience doesn't have much reason to care about them.

The movie throws disaster after disaster at the hero, and he cannot stop them. It has been foretold by the numbers, which are as good as Biblical prophecy in this film, and the resulting carnage is inevitable. The scenes of terror are well-filmed, and the images are striking and disturbing, but they lack genuine tension. One scene, involving a plane crash, even breaks down into unintentional comedy at one point, as Cage tries to ask a person who is running around on fire for assistance.

The last third is the best part. The film shifts from a failed thriller to a fascinating science fiction doomsday film at the end. Now the challenge is no longer to prevent the disasters, as that has been shown to be quite impossible, but it is for John and his loved ones to escape the coming apocalypse and save their own lives - finally, main characters are threatened with death!

Despite some poorly written dramatic scenes earlier in the film and the somewhat contrived nature of the plot's set-up, the last act is strong enough to redeem the film; it puts forth some interesting thoughts on religion, fate and even the meaning of life itself.

It would have been nice to have a film that was good all the way through, but if only one third of the movie is to be excellent, isn't it best that the other two thirds be discarded? As far as modern-day tributes to 1950s science fiction go, it is less entertaining than the last Indiana Jones movie but far better than either Signs or the recent War of the Worlds, and it has greater depth than all three combined. It is a movie worth seeing if one has the patience to see it through to the end.