Reviewed by Doug Cooper
Stars Nicolas Cage, Rose Byrne, Chandler Canterbury,
Lara Robinson, Nadia Townsend, Ben Mendelsohn
Written by Ryne Douglas Pearson, Juliet Snowden,
Stiles Whiye & Stuart Hazeldine
Certification UK 15 | US PG-13
Runtime 130 minutes
Directed by Alex Proyas
In 1959, a group of schoolchildren are asked to draw predictions of what the world will be like in the next 50 years and place them in a time capsule. One strange little girl, though, merely writes a seemingly endless series of numbers.
Fifty years later the time capsule is opened by a new group of students and young Caleb (Canterbury) receives the list of numbers. The list puzzles his father (Cage), a teacher, and soon it comes to light that the numbers are actually frightening predictions of various disasters that have occurred over the past five decades — dates, number of people that are killed, and latitude and longitude of said events. Soon it transpires that there are three disasters yet to happen, and it's up to the stalwart hero to save the day.
Does he manage it? Odds on you won't care to be honest. This is a major step down for director Proyas — it's nowhere near as good as his excellent Dark City or I, Robot. He seems to have lost his energy and originality. This is a by-the-numbers effort that he seems to have sleepwalked through. One can't fault the CGI effects, however. There's a spectacular subway crash and the destruction of a major city is impressively handled, but it's too little too late.
On the whole it's relentlessly po-faced and humourless. Cage carries it in his usual solid style and Byrne, playing a young mother whose parent is responsible for the list, rarely gets to do more than act panicked and frightened. The script is never persuasive enough and in the final third it falls apart completely. It turns from being a mildly intriguing numeroligical conspiracy thriller into a quasi-mystical Close Encounters-type apocalyptic fantasy — in other words, a load of bollocks. Shame, as there's the seed of a good idea here, but it's been undone by Hollywood hamfistedness. As usual with tinseltown fare, there's an overuse of dramatic music — it's intrusive rather than effective at heightening tension. And the pacing should be much tighter.
Knowing is not as bad as the recent remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still, but it shares similar flaws — being silly, protracted and dull on occasion, never as good as it thinks it is. It's a weak exercise in pure hokum, one that could and should have been so much better. Nice try, but no cigar.