This is going to be a very spoiler-heavy review; as I want to save you from seeing this one. I have enjoyed every Nic Cage movie that I’ve seen over the past decade; but I have to say, avoid “Knowing” until you can watch it for free or you are having a “bad movie” night.
Up until the moment depicted above this is a movie that appears to be about a psychic who predicted and wrote down the dates, casualty counts and locations of major disasters from the 50s through 2009 (WHEN THE WORLD ENDS!!!!)
There is one major issue with this premise, and I think this premise has been covered before, so I’ll be brief. People die in large numbers every day, it’s not like death is uncommon, there is someone dying within 50 miles of you right now. Why waste ink on deaths, why not predict majhor events? Because people are morbid assholes! The first date the Nic Cage’s character falls upon is 9/11 (how creative, why not cover the gassing of Kurds in Northern Iraq or something? Or maybe the EThnic cleansings in Rwanda or the former Czechoslovakia ). I was willing to accept that, since most WEstern people are going to recognize 9/11 over any other date.
So we hum along, realize that Nic Cage’s creepy kid has got “The Shine” like Scatman Crothers and we can hope that the movie ends with Nic Cage chasing his creepy kid, some attachd love interest and an African American Psychic through a field while Meteors crash all around them. Magic.
Instead we get:
Fucking Aliens.
It’s aliens and magic escapes and psychics. The world ends and I shit you not the creepy son and the creepy daughter of the daughter of the creepy girl who wrote down the numbers are left on a new planet next to a glowing magical tree in a big garden. Fuck me with a spiked poker if I’m wrong, but isn’t that the bullshit opening to the Bible?
Astute viewers will guess the cause of the Earth dying almost right away, I’ll give you a hint, Nic Cage tosses it around during the big foreshadowing scene.
No awesome meteor scene, no Scatman Crothers, nothing.
It’s fairly obvious the screenwriter had written themselves into a corner when the big reveal came for the death of the earth and so they went with the modern Deus Ex MAchina, fucking Angelic Aliens that only want kids. Idea for parodies, have the aliens be Michael Jackson in disguise.
I was enjoying it up until the aliens showed up too. Boo!