I was on the edge of my seat even before the houselights dimmed: would this be another overblown and underbaked Nick Cage genre movie or would it, just possibly, be a dark and disturbing vision from director Alex Proyas…?

Actually, my curiosity was first piqued when I saw a couple of the film’s set pieces in their entirety at a convention preview a while back. Featuring graphic, violent death (Knowing hinges on the spectacle of mass disasters) presented with impeccable technical skill, these scenes made an impact on me even if I wasn’t quite sure what that impact was. I wondered if the final product would be vaguely exploitative of real-life events or use that same premise to unleash a gripping, no-holds-barred evocation of true horror. In any case, I was left thinking that if the rest of Knowing sported that kind of intensity in at least some form, it might be worthwhile. More importantly, if the narrative rationale for why these foretold calamities were always happening around the protagonist wasn’t very solid—or why they were foretold in the first place didn’t pass the chuckle test—then all the sturm und drang would just amount to more Hollywood posturing about “serious” and “contemporary” fears.

Oh, so I guess a few words about the plot might be in order at this point. In a nutshell, a disturbed schoolgirl writes a mysterious code that’s then buried in a time capsule for five decades. When Cage and his son come into possession of this data, deductive reasoning kicks in and it becomes clear that the numbers correspond to major, worldwide disasters that occurred during that period, including the Lockerbie air tragedy and the terrorist attacks of September 11 (which are referenced directly and indirectly several times). The story hook is that the events signaled by the last few entries have yet to take place… so what is a smart, sensitive, university professor to do when burdened with such foreknowledge? Sounds like the ingredients for a good middlebrow thriller, possibly enhanced by terrifying visuals and a subtext that taps belatedly into Bush-era fatalism and freefloating anxiety.

Well, the problem with Knowing is that while those enhancements do occur, there’s not much of a credible core for them to adhere to. That’s not to say that the film won’t be popular with a wide range of audiences, particularly those who find comfort in Biblical and New Age theology/cosmology as conflated by rather murky sci-fi elements. But for the rest of us, the mysterious, James Marsters-impersonating bad guys (more silly than ominous) and Marco Beltrami’s Bernard Herrmann-on-crank score (more headache-inducing than harrowing) won’t obscure the fact that the narrative underpinnings are far too conventional to be captivating. And if that’s the case, then all of Rose Byrne’s impressive hysterics and the prospect of global cataclysm itself won’t be enough to induce the cathartic experience that Knowing is apparently shooting for.

Proyas’s masterfulness is still evident in those disaster scenes—one in particular is shot in a single, astounding long take—and for many moviegoers their realism will be sufficient to anchor the rest of the movie. And to be fair, Proyas, and editor Richard Learoyd are equally skillful in pretty much all the scenes that are kinetic in some sense: your blood does start flowing. But one’s left with the nagging feeling that these were the only parts of the script that Proyas could really sink his teeth into, the rest of it being way too warmed-over in tone and ambition. That’s not to say that the grander themes of determinism and free will have been worked to death in genre film before, but discerning viewers may come away with the sense that, in the end, they are not really worked too hard here either.

A meta moment from Knowing: a character is made to gaze upon apocalyptic imagery much as the audience is. (Photo Courtesy of Summit Entertainment.)

So although Knowing puts some big ideas on display, they are unfurled with a pandering clunkiness that makes it hard to take them seriously. For example, we get the standard classroom scene in which the movie’s major themes are explicated by a give-and-take with students who are surrogates for the audience, even to the point of helpfully asking about the protagonist’s personal views (so that some character development is shoehorned in at the same time). So isn’t it nifty that the one time we actually see him in action in his profession, Cage’s character happens to be teaching the one course and the one class that touches on the movie’s principle themes? If that weren’t enough, we also get the skeptical colleague, the “voice of reason” stock character. In this case, despite being likeably played by Ben Mendelsohn, the buddy character is more annoying than usual since the script relegates him to little more than an unfortunate and oversimplified caricature of scientific thinking, a conception that seems more gleaned from archaic pop culture representations than actual knowledge of how scientists work and think. Even with my extremely limited background in the discipline, I recall that what makes any given proposition scientific is that it can state the conditions under which it could be proven not to be valid. And Cage’s character is clearly able to do this, as the numbers make specific predictions about not only when disasters will strike, but where as well. In other words, when these prediction start to come true, why doesn’t the buddy break down and admit that the code is useful, even if the how’s and why’s of the phenomenon cannot yet be explained? For that matter, why doesn’t Cage alert the media? After, all he does enjoy the credibility of being on MIT's faculty. Even if he were to lose tenure as a result, wouldn’t it be worth broadcasting his concerns in order to enlist help and notify the public?