...And Know1ng Is Half The Battle!

Hit the cinema today, bad idea, it was made of stronger textures than me, to see Alex Proyas' new film, one that whilst on my radar, was never peaking in desperation to see, Knowing.

In it Sir Nicholas Of Cage runs around screaming "How'd they know the numbers? How'd They Know The NUMBERS!" as people, bewildered, scream they don't know.

But seriosuly, the film begins with about 15-20 minutes in 1959 as some odd child scribbles down a bunch of numbers on a piece of paper that goes into a time capsule, and is opened up in time for Sir Nic's son to find, and for Nic (That's SIR Nick to you) to get obsessed over the meanings of the numbers, of course a big glass of whiskey proves the resolution to working it out, like many theories.

Suddenly Nic runs around trying to fin out when the next incident on the paper will happen, and then we hit the remarkable Act 2.

Sir Nic sits in his leather throne in a car on the highway, with a truck blocking the traffic. He leaves the car, finding the GPS location being the same as the next incident, on that date, and checks to see if everyone is alright, they are.
Then...
As you've seen no doubt in the trailers, a plane crashes down, through the traffic, and explodes.

Bang. There it is.
It's simple, and the CGI is, sadly, low quality for what it could have been, but the next sequence, an extended Children Of Men style shot is amazing.

And in there lies what Knowing aimed to do, and what makes the film surprisingly brilliant.
Nicolas rushes into the area, a man runs around on fire, screaming, Nic tries to help but the guy is oblivious. A woman runs out on fire, he puts a blanket on a guy on the groun, in the background another woman gets out of the back of the plane, it then explodes. Nicolas rushes around, pulls a guy from another part of the plane before the emergency services come in to do their part.
It's truly jaw-dropping. It's exactly what falls under the category of horror to me. It's plausible enough, and done without anything but seriousness, and I felt ill watching it, thinking about the people, how horrible it really is. They really need to outdo themselves to be able to say that the film doesn't crescendo 40 minutes in.

And boy howdy they do indeed beat that.

Nicolas in a train in New York, running after what he thinks is a terrorist, suddenly a train on the other side comes off the rails, smashing through the train and falling onto the platform, we see blood hitting the train from a cockpit view, and an extended sequence of people being crushed trying to escape.

It's just disgusting, I realised this film is commanding complete attention, and it knew how to earn it. Not even such violent mainstream fare as Punisher War Zone, Rambo and Crank could ever beat those scenes for genuine disgutsingness and horror.

But then...
By the third act it was an edge of your seat nail biter, so interesting to see where it's going, it hadn't failed so far, and Nicolas, sans floppy hair, was doing a bang up job at leading the film...
Suddenly the film dumps a lot of Christian mythology or something, and has a whole ET/Indy 4 sequence that takes you out of the realistic nature we saw for an hour and a half, and stops the film dead. After that, even an amazing foot to knee fall from Cage can't get the ilm back. It's dead from then on, you don't care, you don't believe anything else in the film, and the ending is ridiculously similar looking to The Day The Earth Stood Still, last year's one.

And it's a shame, if they got rid of the whisper men and the alien angel things the film would have been a horrifying, memorable, dark, bleak thriller which raised questions, but didn't offer the answers people wanted, and just gave them the end of the World without any promise of hope, which would have been an altogether better film to avoid such Hollywood endings.

But whilst the last act dies, the acting is solid, even the kids for once, the dialogue is expositional without spoon feeding for the most part, some of the banter between Nic and his co-worker is nice, the music has a heavy feel that reinforces the on-screen horrors, and it's generally solid, except the sadly low quality nature of the CGI.

The only other thing I can say about the film, is when Nic's looking at the numbers it felt like a film I made last year, only in serious form, odd.

Still, it'd be a 9/10 if the third act was smarter, but as it is it gets a 7/10, would be a 6, but the disasters are so damn memorable and horrible.

7/10