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Movies & TV

Knowing

KNOWING (E1, 2009) D: Alex Proyas, w/ Nicolas Cage, Chandler Canterbury. Rating: NNNN DVD package: NNN Rating: NNNN


If you loved director Alex Proyas’s Dark City, you’ll like his Knowing. It doesn’t mix film noir into its science fiction or share the earlier film’s otherworldly setting, but it does feature a hero confronted with a big philosophical question and sinister lurkers with an ambiguous agenda.

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With his patented mix of thoughtfulness and sorrow, Nicolas Cage is ideal as astrophysicist John Koestler, newly widowed and closed off from everyone but his son, Caleb (a very likeable Chandler Canterbury). Through Caleb, Koestler obtains a 50-year-old set of numbers that record the location, date and body count of significant disasters from then into the near future.

Trying to stop the disasters and save his son from the lurkers turns Koestler into a battleground for the philosophical question: is everything in the universe random or predetermined? Somehow, the latter implies a creator, which adds a spiritual dimension that resonates with the father-son love story.

Proyas handles the movie’s shift between intimate moments and massive disaster by finding the intimacy in the epic. His plane crash is a bravura two-minute tracking shot crammed with completely convincing CG and practical effects, an amazing technical achievement that never loses its focus on Cage.

I’ve heard people complain that the ending comes out of nowhere. Not quite. Pay close attention and you’ll see hints throughout the movie. Proyas talks about that and his intention to walk the line between the mystic and mundane in his okay commentary. I’m not sure he succeeds entirely, but he comes very close.

EXTRAS Commentary, making-of doc, apocalypse history doc. Widescreen. English, French audio and subtitles.

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