grey thinky whale: Swingannamiss

Why is the complete whiff - a piece of entertainment or art whose aspiration is inversely related its quality - so fascinating? Because when the gap between intended effect and actual reaction is so wide the analysis includes not just a re-evaluation of the attempt, but the goal as well. Why do we watch movies like this? And what defines an effective example of it? Stemming from the logic that you can learn as much from a bad movie as you can a good one, Knowing has a lot to teach us.

Before moving on I will say some good things about Knowing. The score by Marco Beltrami is eerily effective in a Twilight Zone kind of way and the title sequence contained an interesting transition from space to Nicholas Cage's back yard. Incidentally, I will be referring to this character as Nicholas Cage for the duration. In my mind all of his movies are about him, the actor, at various stages of his life. Gone in Sixty Seconds, Ghost Rider, Garding Tess, et al...

Science fiction thrillers like Knowing tend to make use of the “Only Sane Man” writing trope. To be effective in this regard the protagonist must have discovered some applicable principle or theory that, although seemingly insane, is key to understanding the plot’s central nature and most of the time, the nature of the universe and/or humanity itself. The sane man of the plot must be believable and sympathetic and the central mystery must be obscure at first but clearly and cleverly revealed by the climax of the story. Knowing is none of these things.

The first blow against Knowing's credibility is the Nicholas Cage factor. I put it at Con Air when he stopped giving a shit about the quality of his projects and his suitability to play the lead character. Why do casting agents keep putting him in the "Only Sane Man" role? From his twitchy scene chewing in center lane Disney stuff (National Treasure: The Search for Curly's Gold) to weirdo sci-fi hackery (Next) to extra weirdo misogynistic bear suiting wearing craziness (Wicker Man) most audiences expect nothing but barely bottled mayhem from Mr. Cage. So strike one against Knowing for casting Nicholas Cage as the sane one.

The next strike against Knowing is its general aura of stilted weirdness because although the movie tries for a feeling of unsettling weirdness it barely achieves humorous weirdness. Half–hearted attempts at creating a disturbing atmosphere include a spooky child holding a solitary balloon, the obligatory insane scribbling under the crazy person’s bed (shades of Cage’s Wicker Man here too), and of course, the obligatory shadowy outsiders who drive around in their shadowy Mercury Grand Marquis giving shadowy rocks to easily manipulated children.

But all the spooky little girls and balloons and Mercury Marquis in the world pale against the film’s true strangeness. Consider an early scene where Prof. Cage teaches Exposition 101 to a bunch of underwear models and admits that he believes there is no order to the universe and that, "shit just happens" (these kids are certainly getting their money's worth from MIT). Then he stares at them like a mental patient until a female student becomes intimidated. Okay.

Or what about when, after a traumatic episode, Cage’s kid stands up for himself only to receive a look typically reserved for someone who has been eyeing an old lady’s lemon drink. Then the kid says, “I’m not a kid anymore”. He’s ten. Though it must be said that his son rarely acts like a kid, but more like a childless screenwriter’s approximation of one. At one point he asks his dad why he seems so awkward, apparently unaware that his father is Nicholas Cage. Also, Cage has a staring contest with a box.

The third strike against Knowing is that it's little mystery (the numbers) and its big mystery (the fate of the world) have almost nothing to do with one another and make even less sense on their own. The numbers are the dates of disasters on the planet since the 1950s? How many people have to die to make it a disaster? What numeric convention would the code makers use? Why are they communicating this way if their mission is of dire importance? Why do they bother with the numbers at all since in the end they just take what they want (and are not resisted)? Are we really supposed to take this seriously? When Cage says, "come on" as a reaction to finding the first number sequence he is speaking for the audience. It’s funny rather than scary when he gets so worked up over the numbers and the hot google search action that he drops his glass of whiskey. Also, they did an extra nice job working in not only Hurricane Katrina and but 9-11 too. Classy.

So it turns out the numbers reveal all the major disasters that occur from 1950 to the present. Why? Not as a warning to help ward off future disasters. Nope, there is nothing you can do since its all determined anyways by a bunch of aliens that apparently started the human race eons ago and are at the beginning of a new cycle of re-birth. We thought they were angels but they were actually rip-offs of Close Encounters. The alien angels apparently planted the disaster predicting numbers to prepare the way for Cage’s son and Rose Byrne’s daughter to restart the human race. I’m not sure how predicting major disasters of the last 50 years was supposed to help them (especially since the alien angels just take them in the end anyway) but undoubtedly it did the job. It’s this aspect that makes Knowing's big reveal so ludicrous since the numbers don't have much to do at all with the aliens restarting the human race. They didn’t need to send them to enact their plan, but even if they did, why send a message in such an inscrutable way? Got to do something in Act One, I guess.

So in the end what is their plan? A bunch of all-powerful albino alien angels stalk the kid, give him rocks, show him visions of hell (including a glorious flaming moose), and kidnap him from a gas station. No, I'm not kidding. It's hilarious. But it still doesn't make much sense. I have to hand it to Proyas, as demonstrated by Dark City he's willing to go big, but here its all just a joke since it a) makes no sense, b) is completely ridiculous looking, and c) feels completely tacked on to the rest of the movie. I've heard this movie praised for being willing to combine religion and science fiction, but what it really marries is a bunch of terrible ideas with some very poor execution.

And what of the religious aspect of the movie? Nicholas Cage’s character is an avowed atheist at the beginning (his internal struggle with religion after the death of his wife is externalized as a conflict with his pastor father – bleh) but by the end is a firm believer. But in what exactly? The movie makes it clear that it is non-denominational in its faith since all religions apparently misinterpreted our alien overlords as divine spirits. There is no mention of morality or judgment when the entire earth (save for what looks like maybe a few dozen kids and bunnies) is burnt to a cinder by solar radiation at the end of Act Three. Did everyone else deserve to die? Was belief in any creator god enough to save humanity’s miserable soul? The movie isn’t saying, and that is a cop out. It wants to be vague enough to suggest that all religions come from the same ill-defined extra-terrestrial source, but also make the point that faith is vital and empowering. Sorry, but you can’t have it both ways.

The film's science is just as shaky as it's religion, too. At one point Nicholas Cage just walks into his friend's office at MIT and says something to the effect of, "remember when I wrote that badass paper about solar flares" and the friend says, "of course". Huh? What the fuck do you mean, "of course"? Wasn't this guy teaching determinism vs randomness at the beginning of the movie? Nope. Now he is a solar flare expert, and the film lurches from second to fifth gear as Act Three is out of the gate.

The whole movie is like that, and the sum effect is that of a bunch of poorly staged scenes all butted up against each other with no connection or meaning. In one scene after trying to prevent a disaster by calling to warn the cops Cage walks up to a patrolman and asks why the area hasn’t been cordoned off and the cops immediately start chasing him. Why? Who knows? Look over there!

Rose Byrne co-stars as the emaciated corpse of Jennifer Connelly and she does pretty well in the scenes where she is not screaming like an infant or making a face that give one the sense that her face may rip in half. She some classics lines about "thinking of the children" and "going to the caves" before she sees a stone and freaks out for no reason (though the audience knows these are omens of 'the whisper people' her character would have no idea). But hey, whatever, it's a freaky black stone... what would you have done? After all her neglectful stone looking at, the guys in Spike cosplay outfits kidnap her daughter and Cage’s son and after a short blue screen car chase a train flattens her poorly rendered jeep. Then her daughter asks, "where did she go". I nearly died laughing.

I could go one about the see-through special effects (one potentially effective plane crash scene is ruined by poorly rendered CGI flames), the horrendous child actors (the kid playing Cage’s son gives a performance that even Jake Lloyd would have trouble living down), the moronic plot twists (33 is actually EE, which means *gasp* everyone!), or the maudlin touches like Cage’s sign language good bye to his son but what's the point? Shit happens.

I’ll just list my favorite moments from the movie (in no particular order):