I saw Knowing the other day, and thought it worth posting a review, to save people endless pain.
Given the big budget and big names, I feel entirely justified in calling this the worst movie ever, relatively speaking.
Where can I start? Well, the beginning of the movie is slow and childish. It literally felt like watching a kids’ show. And not even the usual kind of kids show where there’s enough adult stuff layered in there to make it watchable for the whole family. It felt like a KID’s movie, in terms of pace, depth, storytelling, emotions, characterisations, action… terrible.
The college philosophy lecture stuff was also really basic, like he was talking to 10 year-olds about the basic idea, and expecting them to come back in a year or two with more grown up questions about it all. Except that then he broke down as if these basic concepts were enough to make a grown college professor’s world shatter.
Fast forward (if only I could have) through a whole lot more of this crap, and eventually you get to a few shockers. The one thing I liked about the whole movie was the way that the plane crash was really loud, fast-paced, and shocking compared to the rest of the movie to that point. It’s a much more realistic portrayal of a crisis than the usual “action hero running through, taking it all in his stride” sort of stuff. I also liked the 3d graphics work, but it’s far from enough to carry the movie.
Then there were the dark trenchcoat guys scaring the kids. These guys were supposed to be ominous I suppose, but mostly they’re just grungy looking, like something out of an 80s music video, or like porn shop customers. Or maybe a kid’s sci-fi show, like you’d see at 4pm or so on Children’s ITV. Could have been interesting, if they’d played on the idea that aliens can’t communicate with humans except in scary images, like The Mothman Prophecies did, but they didn’t explore that at all. In fact, the kids get literally traumatised, ripped away from their parents, dropped on another planet, only to happily skip through the meadow there as if their lives had been idyllic.
Added to that, the direction and editing just suck.
A lot of people are saying this is TOO religious for them, and have even claimed indoctrination or “Christian propaganda”. This is laughable, and tells me more about the emotional issues of those writers than about the movie. This movie barely touches on even the most basic concepts of philosophy and spirituality — barely even addresses stuff we all think about, such as life and death — much less going into a specific religion in any great detail. Yes, there’s an Adam and eve, tree of life moment there at the end, but those are as much (if not more) culturally meaningful imagery of birth and innocence for westerners, as specific religious ideas. Yes, there are angelic figures, but given that they’ve been closer to demons for most of the movie, and are represented as aliens at the end, I’d hardly consider them very angelic in a Christian sense. NOTE: I’m not a Christian, or in any way superstitious. NOTE2: I still would have preferred the movie to explore those concepts MORE, rather than spew such basic, bland, meaningless overtones.
This is really a shockingly bad movie, all ’round. Maybe, there was a good movie there once, before it got edited for mass viewing, but that’s definitely not what made it to the cinema. Do NOT see it. Unless you’re really going for a laugh, it’s really not even worth finding out how bad this is.
Tags: Alex Proyas, cinema, crap, knowing, movie review, nicolas cage, sci-fi
