Some people have a severe distaste for Nicolas Cage. And I understand that. My wife thinks he is creepy in real life. He shared Lisa Marie Presley with Michael Jackson. He’s a Coppola. National Treasure was great. He might be a vampire in real life. Things to consider when pressing judgment upon him.
So I really had no problem conceding to watch Knowing. I do, however, wish that I would have “Known” that it was really about aliens. Seems like an easy out. An easy escape of a poorly thought out plot. Leave it at supernatural or spiritual. But it gets tricky, I suppose, because there must be a greater number of Jesus-following/Bible believing Christians ready to discount the idea of a solar armageddon and extra-terrestrial salvation than there are of adamant alien subscribers.
A breakdown of the story is due, for I fear that most of my readers will never wander into the full realm of Knowing.
Nic Cage is an MIT professor specializing in the studies determinism and randomness. If things are by chance or everything happens for a reason. His wife died in a fire a year earlier and he has his bright son, Caleb, to look after.
In 1959, a time capsule at an elementary school was buried, which contained a paper with a series of numbers written by a young girl within the elementary school. In 2009 they burst that thing open and Nic Cage’s son gets his hands on this paper, and Nic discovers that the numbers actually predict certain dates with catastrophic distasters, how many people will die, and the latitude and longitude that these events will take place.
At this point, its interesting. You see a few predicted events unfold with explosions, plane and subway crashes, people on fire. In a tasteful way. And then these creepy albino Germans start showing up. And 40 minutes later, the truth is out that they are aliens. Disappointment. The aliens are gathering people to start the human race over on a new planet because the earth will be destroyed by a giant solar flare. I gave up at this point. So did the writers. Within the last 30 minutes there are about five lines of dialogue.
And I’m not exactly mad. Definitely not mad at Nicolas Cage. But you’d be better off watching National Treasure 1 and 2 in swift succession.
