OK, right off the bat: it’s a weird flick. This is to be expected, coming as it does from director Alex Proyas, who also directed “The Crow” and “Dark City.” So if you didn’t care for those two, chances are pretty good you won’t like “Knowing.” But if, like me, you liked those earlier flicks…. then chances are that, like me, you’ll think that “Knowing” is a damned fine movie.
Spoliers ahead. So, if you don’t like spoilers, stop reading, ya moron.
As may be suspected from the advertisements, “Knowing” is an end-of-the-world flick. But amazingly, it’s an apocolyptic flick that doesn’t puss out at the end. Also, the world-ending mechanism, while depicted as a bit more badass than would likely be the case, is nonetheless a scientifically plausable one. No “Earth is gonna explode” or “Sun is going to go supernova” or “nanobots are going to scrape the planet down to bedrock” or “the trees are pissed off and are going on the offensive” here.
Much of the movie, for most of the movie, doesn’t seem to make the slightest damned bit of sense… for a while there it seems like it might be a “ghost movie” with creepy supernatural weirdoes who look like “Spike” from “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” and with seemingly meaningless shiny black rocks. But by the end, a good deal of the “huh???” turns into “huh.” Still, some important aspects are left unanswered…. and the movie is better for it. Demons? Angels? Ghosts? Aliens? Time travellers?
There are some substantial religious aspects to the movie, largely revolving around “Ezekial.” In the last few minutes, it comes and whacks you upside the head, but it does it in a visually striking fashion that’s, well, just plain awesome. Even though the religious aspects revolve around a religion that’s not *my* religion, it was quite well done.
I’ve seen at least one critic bitch about the visuals, but I found ’em quite striking. There were more than a few that just about had me floored, including one sequence showing one hell of a forest fire, and certainly much of the last few minutes. The scene where an airliner crashes, again visible briefly in the trailers, is quite simply astonishing, and astonishingly effective. I heard more than a few gasps in the theater. It’s quite simply one of the most horrific things I’ve seen on the big screen in a while that didn’t involve characters intentionally doing evil things to each other. It’s not a brief clip, but an extended sequence of disaster and tragedy. And, importantly, it’s all perfectly relevant to the plot and to the development of Nick Cage’s character.
For those that get the reference, the very best and most striking visual from “The Quiet Earth” will be recalled.
7 Responses to “Movies that don’t suck: “Knowing””
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As a general rule, when airliners crash wingtip first, there’s a lot more fire involved than is shown in the previews.
The amount of fire produced by a crashing jetliner has a lot to do with how much fuel is on board. If the plane has just taken off, there’s a lot of fuel. If it’s about to land, then not so much.
And I seriously doubt that the quantity of fire is greatly changed by whether or not the plane crashes upside down or wingtip first.
In any event, a pretty good volume of fire is shown in the film.
Scott,
The ending was impressive, effects wise. As far as new and striking visuals go… it’s the most impressive visual movie since Doug Trumbull’s “Brainstorm.”
Ah, yes, “Brainstorm.” I’ll have to dig that DVD up again. I was floored when I first saw the full “afterlife” sequence, lo these many decades ago.
That was just nifty.
Plus: the plane crash sequence, all two-plus minutes of it, was a single continuous take. With, obviously, a lot of CG additions, but still…
Brainstorm, Neuromancer and Snow Crash were all stories way ahead of their time and are some of my favorites. The idea of a perceptual reality is part of my Church of the vaguely dissatisfied’s Unifying Theory, which is still yet to be figured out..
The cool thing about Brainstorm was that the sequences when someone is using the Brainstorm machine were shot using Douglas Trumball’s Showscan projection system. So when the scences come up, the regular projection stops and the Showscan kicks in. Showscan is a hyper-realistic film projection system that shoots 70mm film at 60 frames per second, the idea behind it is the human eye is capable of seeing 30 frames per second, but 60 is so fast, it looks real.
There’s a show at the Luxor in Las Vegas where you walk in and sit down in what appears to be a talkshow. since you’re not seeing the flicker of 30 fps, it looks real, right until a character disappears on stage.
The problem with Brainstorm was that it required theaters to buy or rent the Showscan projector so the film never caught on. I went to that show at the Luxor and it did look pretty realistic, but there was an uncomfortable effect after about 5 mins, I had to close my eyes to not feel nauseous. And every so often you could see a hair or a scratch flash by.
With computers reaching the pedaflop range in a couple years (Pedaflop, Petaflop, Petabyte is the ability of a computer to do one quadrillion floating point operations per second. It can be measured as “one thousand teraflops”. A petaflop computer would require a massive number of computers working in parallel on the same problem. Applications might include real-time nuclear magnetic resonance imaging during surgery or even astrophysical simulation.)
If virtual reality reaches a level of real world simulation and your awareness of time and reality is gone, you’d be able to experience a lifetimes amount of experience in a few seconds. You could experience another person’s entire life from their p.o.v. The first “aliens” we will encounter will probably be dolphins or an intelligent AI. How would you explain the concept of money to a dolphin?
Ok I enjoyed this movie right up until the last 30 minutes. yes the effects were great, but somehow the ending felt wrong. It’s like they couldn’t figure out how to end it, so they just whipped up this whole new age UFO-as-God thing. Sorry but I really feel it would have been a much better film if they had kept the last disaster on a much more personal level to Cage’s character. Instead of being about the end of the world, it could have been about him saving his child & finally dealing with his own loss.
> Instead of being about the end of the world, it could have been about him saving his child & finally dealing with his own loss.
Well, *that’d* be boring. What’d be the point of the predictions of disasters, then, since he was not involved in the vast bulk of ’em, and by the nature of the predictions, they’d be easy to avoid?
There’ve beena number of “end of the world” movies… and commonly enough Our Hero manages to either avert the disaster (“We just need to nuke the faultline!” and similar rubbish), or surivive through grit and determination. It was refreshing to see one where Our Hero manages neither of these tricks.