i 'Knowing' 'The end of all things is at hand...' -- The Bible, 1 Peter 4:7
Morning Sentinel
'Knowing' 'The end of all things is at hand...' -- The Bible, 1 Peter 4:7
J.P. Devine Kennebec Journal & Morning Sentinel 03/26/2009

"Knowing" is one of those date night movies where the girl you've been too shy to touch winds up wrapped around you. It's one of those thrillers that keeps you whispering, and in some moments, screaming the usual: "Don't go in there," "Lock the car doors, lock the car doors," "Don't look at him" and "Wake up, wake up, they're in your son's bedroom." We give Oscars to art but we love this kind of fright.

Director Alex Proyas, who brought us the well received "Dark City," brings us yet another darker than dark, full of fun. "Knowing" is the new black.

Pay attention now, there are clues everywhere as to how this ends, how the earth may end, how we may end ... and how we do not. A clue: T.S. Eliot was wrong.

It's 1958. An elementary school is burying a time capsule, and all the students are asked to include a drawing that shows how they think the world will look 50 years in the future. They are all bright and happy. No picture includes the twin towers, a black president, gay couples getting married, Lehman Brothers collapsing or HD TV. They're mostly flowery, happy space rocket pictures, snow men and Easter green grass, that is except for little Lucinda Embry's.

Lucinda (a spooky Lara Robinson playing dual roles) fills her drawing paper with an unbroken series of mysterious numbers. Lucinda keeps scrawling, intensely, a tiny Rainman girl who won't give up her document until the teacher rips it away from her. Then Lucinda disappears. When they find her she is hiding in the basement, scrawling more numbers, in her own blood, on the closet door.

We are in intense city now. Fasten your seat belts and grip the date's hand. We're in for a bumpy ride through horror land, the apocalypse is at hand. Get your papers ready.

Director Proyas moves on, giving us tall, dark, shadowy blonde men in long Brooks Brothers' black overcoats, the Blues Brothers orchestra.

Trust me, these guys are triple scary. They appear now in the woods outside the house and whisper to the brains of children projecting images of the coming bad days. Moose and rabbits bathed in flame, flee the forest. Okay, giggle if you will. They scared the hell out of me and they'll scare you.

Hold on. It's 50 years later, the time capsule is dug up, and each drawing is handed out to the children of the twenty first century.

Nicholas Cage is there as John Koestler, an MIT professor, to watch as his precocious son opens his. It's Lucinda's of course, and we're lucky it landed in the hands of a science professor. If the son or daughter of the local plumber had gotten it, we wouldn't have a movie. Hollywood writers are smart about things like that.

Professor Koestler, a hang dog heavy drinking widower, armed with prodigious amounts of gin, eventually figures out that the random numbers actually pinpoint dates, death tolls and GPS coordinates of all the major disasters of the last 50 years, with the exception of course, of the 2001 election results. But there are three to go.

At the end of the numbers, there are only two letters -- EE. Watch out for those. You'll never guess until Nick up ends a mattress. This moment will have a major impact on what your date will do next, whether you keep your popcorn down and how well you sleep that night.

Proyas gives us all the scary-arm rest gripping, breath sucking tricks in the thriller manual. As we move through the movie with Cage following the numbers, we walk through a world where the sun is growing hotter, the ozone level diminishing, nice folks get nasty, nasty folks get murderous and our food gets scarcer.

It is, on a scale of one to 10, a full ten blow-out of thrills, spills, gasps, nail bitings and eye closers. "The Godfather" it ain't. But as these kinds of movies go, it's a 10. I walk into these kinds of films as a jaded aging critic. Sometimes I wind up sitting there with my 12-year-old inner boy shaking. This is one of those movies.

Proyo's computerized images are some of the best I've ever seen. There is a stunner when out of a rainy dark sky, a huge airliner with engines on fire fills the screen as it comes roaring out of the sky, headed for two miles of parked cars. It's a lung gripper unlike any I've seen.

The acting, other than Cage's usual reserve, is better than usual for a spiritual thriller. Rose Byrne of the hit television show "Damages," gives Cage a last minute promise of new found love, as the daughter of the prescient Lucinda, and Chandler Canterbury as Cages son, Caleb, is already on his way to better parts.

In this end of days thriller, Proyo gives us carnage and chaos, death on the highway, burning moose and redemptive bunny rabbits. Not to mention thousands of tiny polished black stones. There is a message of hope here in the final scenes. Here's a clue. E.T. was right.

At fade out, our atheist professor reunites with his preacher father and there are hugs all around. But outside in the streets, the sun is coming up. Send in the scary clowns. There should be scary clowns. Don't bother. They're here.

J.P. Devine is a former stage and screen actor.

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