A wise man once said, "Don't go looking for disaster, it will find you soon enough." Apparently Nicolas Cage's astrophysicist, John Koestler, missed class that day because as soon as he discovers where and when upcoming disasters will occur, he drops son Caleb off at his sister's place, furrows his brow and heads straight into the maelstrom.
But then, every disaster movie needs an unlikely hero and "Knowing," a moody and sometimes ideologically provocative film, has just the hero it needs in the MIT professor who subscribes to the notion that everything that happens in life is nothing more than a series of random events. Who better to face down a New Age-style Armageddon steeped in spirituality, numerology, alien visitors and end-of-days philosophy than a skeptic?
We start back in 1958, with the burial of a time capsule filled with letters from elementary school children, including one from a troubled young girl who feverishly fills both sides of her paper with a string of seemingly random numbers. Fifty years later, Caleb, played with soulful introspection by Chandler Canterbury, goes to that very same school and when the capsule is opened, he's the kid who gets her letter. Coincidence? I think not.
There are forces and issues large and small at work here, with John struggling as much with the realities of single parenting as the dark clouds that are gathering, both literally and metaphorically, around him. He's a widower and we see his grief everywhere, in the sadness as he tries to care for Caleb and the bottle of booze he sloshes through each night. Where most of us would just curse that late-night whiskey spill on the letter from long ago, John instead begins to decipher its message. You'd think the secret of the numbers would be hard to unlock, but once John sees the sequence 09112001, despite his inebriated state, he quickly figures out that the numbers correlate with disasters -- natural and otherwise -- both past and future. And with that, the death match between professor and universe begins as John tries to change a course that seems, if the numbers are to be believed, predetermined.
Director Alex Proyas ("The Crow," "Dark City" "I, Robot") has long been drawn to otherness. He's definitely mucking around in that and more here, with "Knowing" his most overtly allegorical film yet.
