Knowing: Review by The Loser

KNOWING:

In 1959, at William Dawes Elementary School in Lexington, Massachusetts, a time capsule containing students' drawings of their ideas of the future is buried and set to be ceremoniously opened 50 years later. A girl named Lucinda Embry contributes a page full of seemingly random numbers although she is stopped before she completes the page. That night, she is found in a school closet, where she has scratched the remaining numbers on the door with her bare hands, and she has complained about hearing voices in her head.

In 2009, the time capsule is opened and the drawings are given to the current students. A boy named Caleb receives Lucinda's envelope. His father, John Koestler, a widower and professor of astrophysics at MIT, takes interest in the paper and soon realizes some of the digits represent the dates and death tolls of every major disaster over the past fifty years, and suggests three disasters still to come. Meanwhile Caleb begins receiving visits from mysterious figures in overcoats, "The Strangers". During these encounters he hears their overlapping telepathic whispers.

Pros: Some pretty High-octane action scenes going on here. My personal favorite one being the plane crashing into the highway. It's pretty intense and you see burning people screaming as they stumble around on the ground. It's entertaining as hell, albeit gruesome.

Cons: Way to many to name, but I will try to tell you how bad this movie is. Ok, first of all, the actors might as well be zombies. Nicholas Cage delivers his lines with the enthusiasam of a paitent with terminal cancer, and the child actors are so honest to god-awful, that I cringed every time they spoke. Some of you may recognize Caleb as the kid from I Am Legend. (He didn't speak in that movie;no wonder it was so good). While not as bad, John's friend, Diana, is completely unremarkable, along with every other actor in the movie. One thing that is always stuck in my mind is the scene when they dig up the time capsule in the school yard, all the children get pictures except for Caleb. While Caleb is looking at the sheet of numbers he dug up, a boy walks over to him and says, "Haha, all of us got pictures!" Yet this line is unreasonably badly delivered, and I mean BAD. It is so bad, in acting school, they should use it as an example of what NOT to do.

Besides the abmysal acting, the movie's disaster scenes are also boring and dumb (albeit the plane scene, which i liked). The train disaster makes no sense and I don't even remember if they explained how it happened. Also, the biggest and final disaster, where (SPOILER ALERT SPOILER ALERT) the Earth is destroyed probaly has the worst special effects in recent memory.

Oh yes, speaking of the ending. IT WAS THE WORST ENDING POSSIBLE!  It rendered the ENTIRE movie useless, because no matter how much Nicholas Cage tried to stop the disasters, HE COULDN'T DO ANYTHING ABOUT IT. So, (SPOILERS) Earth blows up anyways, making all that reaserch and talking in the movie useless,  which makes you think about how much time you wasted watching Knowing.

BOTTOM LINE: Thankfully, I saw Kick-Ass AFTER I saw this movie, which reminded me again about why I like Nicholas Cage. This movie looked awesome in it's teaser trailers and massive marketing campaign, but it DID NOT live up to the hype. See, this is one of those movies where if someone told me to review it IMMEDIATLY after I saw it, I would probaly have rated it higher and liked it more. But once you think about the abmysal acting, laughable story, mediocre special effects, and boring and uninteresting characters, you realize how bad this movie is. Oh one more thing. In the end,  some sort of mystical beings (I think aliens) take the kids to another planet to avoid Earth's impending demise. IT IS THE STUPIDESSTT thing ever!  The kids run away holding animals to explore this new planet and... AGHHHHHH!!! DO NOT see this movie! EVER!

Did it live up to the hype? NO

Re-Watchable?  NO

Watchable? If you can ignore the acting and special effects, it is somewhat watchable. I suggest turning it off thirty minutes before the movie ends though.

OVERALL SCORE: 4/10