Death by numbers

Knowing
Review by Nathan Weinbender

“Knowing” is equal parts ridiculous and engrossing, a cheesy sci-fi potboiler dressed up in million-dollar clothing. It concerns itself with many weighty subjects, including the order of the universe, the fragility of mankind and possible Armageddon, but it’s hardly physiologically complex; in fact, it’s mostly quite silly.

Yet, almost in spite of myself, I found the film to be completely involving, even though the story loses its footing in the final acts.

The movie’s mythology is rooted in a sheet of paper covered with seemingly random numbers, an artifact from a time capsule buried fifty years ago. Nicolas Cage, playing astrophysicist and MIT professor John Koestler, discovers all too quickly that the code has accurately predicted nearly ever major disaster in recent history.

And, whaddaya know, there are only three tragedies remaining before the numbers run out! So Koestler makes it his mission to stop the events, which begin with a plane crashing in a field and end with what could very well be the apocalypse.

If that isn’t bad enough, Koestler’s young son Caleb (Chandler Canterbury) starts seeing dark figures in the woods outside the house. They whisper to him, he says, and make him envision terrible things. Later on, they pull up in a car and drop a shiny black stone into his hands.

By the halfway point, I was surprisingly absorbed in this premise. Sure, its solemnity will probably merit chuckles from most audiences (any movie that takes itself even halfway seriously runs that risk these days), but I went happily along with the movie’s apocalyptic fervor.

Maybe it has to do with the director, Alex Proyas, who turned “The Crow” and “Dark City” into superior gothic dramas. His shadowy, angular style lends itself well to both suspense (there is genuine tension when Cage approaches the dark figures in a field) and action (a sequence involving the derailment of a subway train is amazingly well done).

The screenplay is credited to three different writers, and it shows. It begins with a perfectly intriguing premise that asks a fairly astute question—is the universe founded on free will or determinism?—and ends with spaceships and explosions and religious symbolism and the like. I don’t know; I suppose a story with the ultimate destination of certain catastrophe is bound to be excessive.

The critical response to “Knowing” has been mostly lackluster. It’s “mumbo jumbo on an apocalyptic scale,” says the Baltimore Sun, and the Boston Globe reports that it “sails boldly off the edge of the absolutely preposterous.” The New York Daily News asks, “Do you mind if the filmmakers couldn’t decide what they were making? An apocalyptic chiller? Disaster flick? Alien horror movie? Paranoid religious parable?”

I get it, and I guess I agree to a certain extent. The plot is self-righteous, the musical score is bombastic and manipulative, the story unravels at a remarkable rate in its last moments and Cage is so enamored with doomsday prophecies and cryptic numerology that he practically froths at the mouth.

But sometimes a movie just works in spite of everything. Sure, I can rattle off the film’s problems in hindsight, but I can’t deny that it held me captive in the moment. Rather than ask how or why, I’d simply like to acknowledge that it just did.

Directed by Alex Proyas. Written by Ryne Douglas Pearson, Juliet Snowden and Stiles White. Starring Nicolas Cage, Chandler Canterbury, Rose Byrne, Lara Robinson, Nadia Townsend and D.G. Maloney. PG-13; 122m.