Dorkgasm Gonzo Is God

          Alex Proyas is one strange director.  He has a propensity to make dystopian cinema that revels in the dark side of humanity.  From the fires of The Crow to the technological terror of I, Robot, Proyas has given us visions of a future that differ from our own only in the degree to which we’ve screwed up our world.  Typically, his films end with the hero defeating the larger menace behind our suffering through perseverance, heroically outsmarting the villain at the last minute.  This time, however, Proyas has tried a different approach.

          There is no villain in Knowing, per se, unless you count the convoluted plot.  Nicholas Cage plays an MIT professor who, by sheer chance, winds up in possession of a series of numbers written fifty years prior by a young girl.  By total luck, he discovers that the numbers correspond to disasters around the world over the last fifty years.  The last couple of sequences seem to denote future events that, coincidently, are set to occur within easy driving distance of him.  Getting the picture yet?  Each scene in the film unfolds like this, and the acting doesn’t help. 

          Nicholas Cage may be an Oscar winner, but his acting is typically hit or miss.  I think that this is one of those misses.  His character is supposed to be a loving, emotional father who has only recently become a widower.  In order to cover for Cage’s emotional distance, Proyas sticks a bottle in his hands in every other shot, a la Leaving Las Vegas.  He never seems drunk, mind you, so we must assume that it is there simply to convey why his lines sound like they’re being delivered by a robot.  The supporting cast isn’t much better, with the two adult females in the cast (real life best friends Rose Byrne and Nadia Townsend) trying desperately to cover their native Australian accents.  The children in the cast, sadly, out act everyone around them, and only just barely.

          As if the coincidences weren’t enough, Proyas has a problem selling us on the spookiness of the messengers that start showing up to whisper thoughts into the children’s heads.   Sure, they wear long black coats and look like albino extras from a Buffy episode, but they seem to be the only characters who might have answers.  Not that they actually offer any of those answers, mind you, just that they obviously know what is going on and yet no one thinks to ask.  Cage buys a gun, the kids scream a lot, and in the end, Eric Von Donneken fans get a chance to rejoice.

          The film tries to meet the worlds of science and faith halfway, but fails both utterly.  There are moments when the scientist considers issues based on faith, and the faithful are faced with the inevitability of science.  I’d like to think of this film as science fiction, but part of the problem with sci-fi today is that it has lost its way.  Hell, if anything, this movie is a perfect example of why Americans take even horror more seriously than science fiction.  Gone are the days of the powerful, self-assured scientists who sweep in and save the day with knowledge and truth.  We are an impotent society, helpless in the cosmos and utterly reliant upon outside forces to save us from doom, this new generation of genre movies seems to say.  The end of this film tries too hard to be edgy, and simultaneously hopeful, leaving nothing but a bad taste in our mouths.  Of course, nothing can save Knowing from the over-use of dues ex machina, but you can save your money by not heading out to theaters to see it.

Final Verdict (out of 5):