posted
Knowing, a movie that just opened recently, starring Nicholas Cage is one of the best movies I have seen in a long time. Usually I don't like end-of-the-world stories, but this one is profound, intriguing, rather mystical, with tremendous impact and winds up in a way actually being encouraging.
The mood is set by the music score which early on, and several more times in the movie, employs the Allegretto from the second movement of Beethevon's seventh symphony--also known as "The Funeral March." What music could be more appropriate for the end of the world? Actually, when I heard the music, I knew it was Beethoven, and it seemed familiar, but it had been years since I listened to his seventh symphony. I had to look it up on the Internet. Then when I took out a CD with Beethoven's seventh and keyed it to the second movement, there was the music. Utterly haunting, powerful, driving. I read that using this music was Cage's idea.
The special effects are fantastic. And there is considerable artistry involved, in the way the movie opens with a view from space of the night-time eastern U.S., and zooms down closer and closer to focus on the lights of New York, and on down to cars headlights on the roads, etc.; then near the end of the movie it shows the fire from the solar flare consuming the world, showing the same scenes, zooming out in reverse order from the beginning of the movie.
There were drawings made by two people that showed a kind of wheel-within-a-wheel with a Godlike figure seated in the midst. These evoked the idea of the Second Coming of Christ, though the movie itself did not depict anything this blatantly religious.
The aliens are very interesting. Are they meant to be aliens from the future, or humans from the future, or angels sent back in time by God? At one point there are smears of light that rise up from them and sort of resemble wings.
Some elements of the story could be criticized, even though very entertaining. Why would anyone force this little girl to write down two pages full of numbers, which 50 years later would be discovered by the hero (Cage) an astrophysicist at MIT, to give the dates, number of people killed, plus longitude and lattitude, of various major disasters? The airliner crash which the hero observes is stunning.
I was glad to see that the two little kids were not the only ones saved--similar wheel-within-a-wheel ships were seen rising up from earth as well. But it was disappointing that apparently only children were saved. The last scene, where they are deposited on what seems like a new earth, comes to rest on a magnificent blossoming tree, perhaps meant to evoke the Tree of Life.
A friend of mine said what really blew him away was coming out of the theatre, and seeing a very similar blooming tree right by where his car was parked (this was in Tennessee). The trunk of the tree was not as wide as the one in the movie. He took a picture of the tree by his car. It looked to me like the pear trees we used to have in our back yard. They looked alot like that when they were in full bloom.
I definitely intend to buy the DVD of this movie when it comes out.
Posts: 3742 | Registered: Dec 2001
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posted
I'm not sure if I agree with the literal meaning of what you said, but it was not appropriate for this board. Was out celebrating something last night and was drinking water and browsing the internet to sober up a bit before bed. I came back this morning to apologize.
Posts: 10177 | Registered: Apr 2001
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posted
This forum needs a [/drunk] html tag. It could make the words kinda wavy while both stretching and condensing them.
Posts: 14316 | Registered: Jul 2005
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Thanks, Tom. And MrSquicky, for the apology. That is funny, Blackblade.
C'mon, you guys--the movie is really enjoyable. Go see it. If you won't trust me, you can trust Nicholas Cage, to give you a good movie.
Posts: 3742 | Registered: Dec 2001
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quote:Originally posted by Ron Lambert: Thanks, Tom. And MrSquicky, for the apology. That is funny, Blackblade.
C'mon, you guys--the movie is really enjoyable. Go see it. If you won't trust me, you can trust Nicholas Cage, to give you a good movie.
Have you seen Ghost Rider? But hey I thought he was way fun in The Rock, and Raising Arizona so I might give the movie a chance.
Posts: 14316 | Registered: Jul 2005
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posted
Yes, I saw Ghost Rider. I did not care that much for it, mainly because the idea of it was too silly. Nicholas Cage was great in Next, which I really enjoyed. National Treasure was a bit too hard to believe, but a lot of people liked it. Actually, he has made a lot of movies. Some of them are bound to be better than others.
But regardless of whether I liked the movie, Nicholas Cage always made it better. I like Cage. And none of his movies were bad.
Posts: 3742 | Registered: Dec 2001
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The link, by the way, just points to the wikipedia page for the movie. The original URL's format is such, though, that Hatrack won't let me post it.
Posts: 16059 | Registered: Aug 2000
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posted
I couldn't properly describe it. Cage was in it, and I would just be surprised if you liked it, that's all. It's a David Lynch film and I think I've hated everything I've seen from him. (But some consider him an important auteur. *shrug*)
posted
Elements reminded me of Arthur C. Clarke and Stephen Baxter's novel Sunstorm.
I enjoyed it as well, though I found it predictable. Maybe I have read too much sci-fi, but I pretty much knew what was coming.
Still don't understand what the point of Nicolas Cage's character was for though.
Spoiler:
I get the whole religiouns undertones of free will (making the kids choose to go), but they really didn't have to make him go through all that just to kill him and take his kids.
Posts: 3134 | Registered: Mar 2005
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quote:Originally posted by Ron Lambert: National Treasure was a bit too hard to believe, but a lot of people liked it.
That reminds me of when I saw an advance screening of National Treasure in a packed theater in Madison. When the blonde woman (Diane Kruger's character, who was so uninteresting that I've forgotten her character's name) poked at the scrolls in the vault, asking "Are these the scrolls from Alexandria?!" a dude in the back yelled "NO" and walked out.
It was funny. Perhaps in one of those You-Had-To-Be-There sense, though.
---
I have to admit, I was going to entirely ignore Knowing. Now I'll look for it at a budget theater. It sounds like it could be interesting. Thanks!
Posts: 3932 | Registered: Sep 1999
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posted
The burning of the Library of Alexandria is considered by historians to be one of the greatest losses of all time. For centuries, they used to collect ancient scrolls and maps brought in by sailors and traders from all over the world. Scribes were employed to copy the older scrolls before time crumbled them to dust. A huge number of scrolls were lost.
I can sympathize with the "dude in the back" who "yelled 'NO' and walked out."
Posts: 3742 | Registered: Dec 2001
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posted
There were things about this film that I really liked. There were unexplained gaps and holes in the plot that kept me from being thrilled with the movie as a whole.
Posts: 324 | Registered: Mar 2008
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quote: All I ask of fiction and fantasy is that they not tell lies about reality in the broad sense.
Right? When a friend of mine was explaining to us who the Iron Man 2 villains are, I expressed my annoyance with the idea that one of them could be a member of the Russian Royal Family. My friends actually jumped on me for having no problems accepting aliens and superpowers but balking at real people behaving out of character for no reason.
I find the latter harder to swallow. I don't know why, but that's how my mind works.
Posts: 2283 | Registered: Dec 2003
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posted
That sounds like a conversation that happens at my house, often.
Last night, in fact, I was shooting Nazi zombies with my husband and complaining that sometimes they can walk through the window while you're building it. At which he said, "you don't have a problem with Nazi zombies but you do have a problem with them if they can walk through a window?"
posted
One of the things that bugged me about "Knowing" is that the sending of the prophecies seemed quite pointless. Initially I thought that the purpose of the prophecy was to guide the kids to the place they were supposed to be, and the aliens'/angels' attitude would be "If they're smart enough to follow the clues, we'll save them."
But that can't be it, because the aliens/angels took an active role in shepherding the kids to the right place (even to the point of kidnapping them and dragging them to the rendezvous point.)
So what was the point?
Posts: 324 | Registered: Mar 2008
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posted
Jeorge--the only real point was to make an interesting story. The whole prophecy thing did not make much sense, as you pointed out. It did not make any difference!
Nighthawk, when I talk about telling the truth in the broad sense, I think the prime example of fiction that violates this and becomes very objectionable is the Gor novels by John Norman, which espouse as a basic premise the idea that women secretly like to be abused and made into sex-slaves. This is lying about reality. Such fiction is actually dangerous, and quite possibly harmful. I read some years ago a news story where someone was arrested for kidnapping and holding a woman prisoner in a basement for months, and he claimed for his defense his reading of the Gor novels.
Conversely, the value of science fiction and fantasy is that they often allow us to view ourselves from a new perspective, and realize some things that are profoundly true and revelatory of human nature.
Posts: 3742 | Registered: Dec 2001
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posted
Saw "Knowing" today. Late to the party, but I wanted to throw in my own two cents.
(I'm kind of stupid that way.)
(No, quoting that back does not make you clever.)
It's an odd movie in that I feel like I have no problem with the underlying premise. I think that, perhaps, there was a good movie to be made here. Maybe even without having to revise too much.
But it also frustrated me tremendously.
I've liked Nicholas Cage, and I've seen him in enough things that I thought I understood the man to have some range. You would hardly know it from his performance in this movie. At times he's apparently supposed to be going through despair, incredible emotional stress, resentment bordering on rage, and he's just- slack. Nothing there but a few mannerisms. He's not Nicholas Cage playing A Character; he's Nicholas Cage playing A Nicholas Cage Guy (tm).
Too many of the main characters- of whom there are few, so no excuses- act far more like characters in a movie than intelligent human beings in a weird situation. They frequently act- and speak- not out of particular motivations, but to create or extend tension, provoke conflict, or delay resolution.
One example that I couldn't shake while I was in the theater: you're dealing with mysterious people who are somehow related to the occurence of major disasters- disasters which you have clearly proven occur in a predetermined manner which your presence or absence does not change (at least in as much as it's been accounted for in its predestined outcome)- and the best thing you think of to do is to run after these mysterious people, threatening and brandishing a gun?!
...This guy teaches at MIT...?
(Post-movie, I was struck by a bit of Fridge Logic. The "Whisperers" have known of the coming doom of Earth for at least fifty years, and they decide to do all their evacuation on the day before said doom?... What are these, the ultimate alien procrastinators? I mean, yeah, given you could suggest there have been rumors of alien abduction for some time, yatta yatta. But there's nothing in the movie itself to suggest that the evacuation isn't happening all at once, and the scale of it rather implies that it is.)
As it has been said, little of the over-all plot will come as a huge surprise to anyone who reads science fiction with any frequency. Awareness of that fact probably would have helped the crafting of this film.
There are certainly some good things; like I say, I think the basic premise is very workable, I kind of like the relationship between father and son, I appreciate that it at least tries to touch on issues of philosophy and religion. And I rather liked that the rift between the principal protaganist and his father wasn't spelled out for us, but I suddenly knew very well what had happened between them anyway from what I could intuit at the edges.
And things do blow up in a fairly impressive manner, for all the excessive availability of CGI on the screen these days.
A little script debugging, a lead who doesn't seem to be phoning large sections in, a little more faith in the central premise and a concurrent removal of false and unnecessary character conflicts and padding, this could have been a very good sleeper science fiction movie. As it is, I think it's an interesting failure. I don't regret seeing it, but I can't urge people to rush out and catch it, either. Given what many will see as a downer ending, combined with its various problems, I suspect the film is doomed, which is kind of a shame.
"Children of Men" came up in conversation recently. If only this movie had had as much faith in its ability to hold its audience's attention. A lead like Clive Owen couldn't have hurt, either. (Or Liam Neeson... William Hurt... Gary Sinise... John Cusack... Just about anyone capable of actually convincing me that they're teaching a class at M.I.T. that the students find compelling, honestly.)
Posts: 3826 | Registered: May 2005
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posted
I saw it last weekend. I walked out half-way through and sat in the lobby while my sister finished the film. It scared me in all the ways I don't like to be scared. My sister walked out of the film going "what the heck?" For different reasons neither of us will spend time seeing it again.
Posts: 862 | Registered: Oct 2003
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I felt comfortable with this movie, despite many logical problems, because I am familiar with Biblical views of the Apocalypse, and I share in the remaining longing many people of faith still have for God to fulfill His Word and put a final end to evil and restore Paradise. This movie tried to evoke such things, yet without being overtly religious. It is not a religious "tract." Yet it dares to whisper hope. You could view the "angels" as just advanced aliens who foresaw the destruction of earth, and wanted to preserve a core remnant of the human species. Some people do not enjoy this kind of speculative fiction.
As I indicated before, I generally do not like end-of-the-world stories, and especially dislike aftermath stories, because predictably, none of them seem to end happily in a state of bliss. As such they seem like a failure of faith to me, rather than serving as an encouragement.
But I have come to think it praiseworthy whenever the movie industry makes any attempt in the direction of a blissful outcome to the end of the world. Maybe I can be at rest about it, because I know it will not be the way they describe, when the real thing comes. If you study the prophecies of the Bible, especially Revelation and Daniel, making proper application to the time of the end as indicated in the text, it can be vastly encouraging. Because it means no matter how we humans screw up this world, there is still hope God will straighten everything out. He said He would. Being the Creator, He knows how to re-create the earth, and put everything back the way He originally intended for it to be. That "lake of fire" mentioned in Revelation, where all those who cling to evil (including Satan and his devils) are finally consumed and eradicated forever, is really just the means by which God will recreate the surface of the earth in a second Creation Week--which those who love and trust God will be privileged to witness from a place of safety--the New Jerusalem.
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