Knowing

Title: Knowing
Director: Alex Proyas
Starring: Nicolas Cage, Chandler Canterbury, Rose Byrne, D.G. Maloney, Danielle Carter
Length: about 2 hours 15 minutes.

Describe the movie in one word: Crap

Plot: In 1959 children of a real sad and lonely school in US of A come up with a brilliant idea. They all imagine how future is going to be and draw pictures of whatever they think the future will look like. These drawings are then put together in a "time capsule" (which is basically a metal case in the shape of either a malformed rocket or very sick condom) and bury that capsule in the school ground. While all students draw stuff like rockets and aliens and a museum dedicated to brains etc, one particular girl scribbles lots of random numbers on her sheet. No one understands why and the girl is portrayed as slightly mentally disturbed.
Fast forward 50 years, we have Nicolas Cage who is a professor at MIT. His son goes to the same school (God knows why) which had this wicked idea of burying that time capsule. Of course 50 years have passed and it is time to dig that capsule out and see what kids had drawn. The capsule is dug out in a ceremony and all the present school kids are handed a drawing each from the capsule. Of course Nicolas Cage's son gets the weird sheet with numbers.

Long story short, Nicolas Cage soon realizes that this seemingly random list is actually a list of dates and places (latitude and longitudes) predicting every major disaster in the world along with the death toll in that disaster. What's more there are three events which haven't happened yet and one of those events will be something major (No it’s nothing to do with G. W. Bush getting brains). He must now do all that he can to "save the world and the mankind".

My Psychobabble: Knowing is about crap. Where crap happens on top of more crap which all together leads to a crap mountain in which Nicolas Cage tries to ski. This triggers an avalanche of crap with Nicolas Cage trying to ride the avalanche like a horse rider but fails miserably and ends up buried in huge pile of crap which stinks so bad that the audience gets a headache.

OK I accept that the premise of the movie is good. Hell I was excited about going and watching this one. It’s got Nicolas Cage and an awesome future predicting list of numbers and cryptic codes and decryption involved. It is like high quality geek weed rolled up in a science fiction joint. What more could someone like me want!

Tangent: Booze, money, Kelly Brooks, freedom, lottery, beating my estate agent, hell beating all the estate agents, Shilpa Shetty, more booze, more money.....


The movie fails miserably. The execution of what was a brilliant idea is pathetic. The CGI (computer generated imagery) is awful, the direction is horrible, the script not worth the paper it was written on and the acting - rubbish. Let us digress for a minute from these normal parameters that usually can summarize a movie and let me ask you this - how many movies can you think of where you actually noticed the background music score? One? Two? Three?

This one has such awful background music that it will scream at you and make you notice it. It is like a whinning child in a supermarket aisle. It will throw itself on the ground, yell at you, jerk its limbs in the air until you are forced to sit up and give it attention. An of course the relevance of the music is only as much as that of a whinning child in the supermarket aisle. It goes completely out of synch with the situation on the screen. You might as well have an F M Radio on and play whatever track comes on it along with the movie. Just make sure that the program on the FM radio channel is about the worst songs in the history of music.

I am not even going to count the mistakes in the movie or the sheer acts of stupidity. But to list a few

1. It is perfectly normal to blow your lawn at 4 am
2. When you want to scare someone off whom you can not see, slam your baseball bat in a tree and yell "You want some of this!"
3. You are a genius and think better when you are drunk.
4. You have to act like a total jerk and a complete jacka$$ if you have above average analytical ability.

I can go on and butcher the movie more but I am afraid I will be including spoilers if I disclose anymore about the movie.

Verdict: Turn on your heels and run. You can do something much more worthwhile with these two hours and 15 minutes of your life (like count the grains of rice in a bag or count your own hair) than watch this movie.