Eye Candy #69 - "Knowing"

Knowing: The latest entry by Alex Proyas, who gave us “Dark City” and "The Crow", this is one of the better Nicholas Cage films in recent memory(certainly better than "Next", "Ghost Rider" or "Bangkok Dangerous"). Cage is John Koestler, a professor at MIT, who finds a list of numbers buried in a time capsule that predicts dates, locations, and body counts for the worst disasters in the last 50 years…which is how long the time capsule was in the ground. So someone has predicted these events and future events with startling accuracy. So Koestler both tries to prevent future disasters predicted by the numbers, using dates and locations, while at the same time trying to get other people to believe in the truth of the numbers. But who sent the numbers and what do they want? I liked this film. It’s end of the world/apocalyptic thriller-y movie (like “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” is vaguely thriller-y) that‘s not too terribly deep (in fact it‘s mighty conventional in terms of its various plot devices), but it does have some good special effects (two of the disasters depicted in the film, a plane crash and a subway crash, are extremely well done). It is overlong, at just over 2 hours, and not all of the images and plot points are fully fleshed out, but it‘s not boring. Cage isn’t a “doer” in this movie so much as he is a witness to what’s going on. It’s a shame that all his other crap movies made us all gun shy about this one.Rose Byrne is given barely anything to do at all. Still, for the sum of its parts, it's not bad. Woodchuck sez, “Worth a look.”