Oh, Nicolas Cage. Nicky boy, what are we going to do with you? There’s just something about you that’s so… I don’t know, likable? When I see you on the screen and you squint and scoff and make weird faces, it doesn’t make me hate you. When Jimmy Fallon did that on Saturday Night Live, I wanted to stab him in the face with a corkscrew, but when you do it? I just kind of chuckle and look past it. John Koestler (Cage) is a brilliant, yet troubled man. He’s a professor at MIT, which pays the bills, but a year before, his loving wife died in a hotel fire, leaving him alone to raise their son, Caleb (Chandler Canterbury), in a crumbling old house. Fifty years earlier, creepy pale girl Lucinda Embry (Lara Robinson, needing only a bucket of water and clown paint to go shoot The Grudge 3) wrote out a series of numbers and stuck it in a time capsule. Caleb is the lucky boy who, through accident or determinism, receives that missive. It’s a key; the numbers predict a series of disasters and their death tolls. It’s up to Professor Cage and Lucinda’s daughter Diana (Rose Byrne) to figure out, and then try to stop, the last remaining massive disaster. I really can’t decide if Knowing is ludicrous or brilliant. Perhaps it’s both. Kind of like Nicolas Cage as a mathematician is both ludicrous and brilliant. At no point in time do I actually buy him as a professor at MIT, yet when he’s protecting his son or racing a pickup truck against time, his weird twitchy intensity works well, as does his constantly worried face and body language. While there are moments in which he strains credibility by being himself (particularly when trying to summon some anguished grief), he’s not too bad. I think he’s trying again, which is nice given that we know what he’s done in the past versus his recent output. Rose Byrne is in fairly good form as well, though all she has to do is be sane and let Nic do his crazy neurotic shtick to come off well. Despite having kids in crucial roles, both Canterbury and Robinson (who also plays Diana’s daughter, Abby) are able to be precocious without being terribly obnoxious, though both have their moments of awfulness. The script of this film is also really interesting (which could be a byproduct of the fact that there are five listed as working on the screenplay and a further adaptation by Proyas). It’s a fairly conventional movie of this ilk 95 percent of the time, but while it flirts with becoming totally predictable, it always swerves at the last minute to give you something you don’t expect. There are several moments that, in a different movie, would be pedestrian and predictable. What you think is going to be next doesn’t happen in this film, but it doesn’t sink into a bizarre M. Night Shyamalan-style twist festival. If it sounds like I’m not entirely sure what to make of this movie, it’s because I’m not. It has a lot of great qualities about it, and it does some really ballsy things in terms of how it approaches its plot and how it resolves the big issues. I’d love to discuss them but don’t want to spoil the surprise. It brings up a lot of deep issues, yet it’s still kind of a big, implausible sci-fi blockbuster. There are some awful moments in terms of performance and script, yet some surprisingly good moments. The second ending after what I felt should’ve been the first ending also took off some points. It was very thought provoking, but flawed. US correspondent Ron Hogan believes that he’s confused about this film because Nicolas Cage gave him brain damage. Find more by Ron at his blog, Subtle Bluntness and daily at Shaktronics and PopFi.  

Interview: Alex Proyas