Knowing (Nicolas Cage) – Science fiction is one of the richest genres in film. In fact, film does science fiction far better than books or other media do. That isn’t necessarily true of drama. Comedy, on the other hand, is done best of television because it is very hard to sustain comedy for 90 minutes or more. Great movie comedies are under-rated in the film world and they are rarely rewarded at awards time. But, when you think about science fiction, television has made advances in recent years but film is the perfect medium. Knowingis a good, but not great, science fiction film. It is not, as Roger Ebert claims, the best science fiction movie ever or at least in recent years. I will try to explain why.
Start with the premise. A strange, unpopular, and odd girl in a grade school in 1959 comes up with the idea for her school’s time capsule to draw something predicting what the world will be like 50 years later (in 2009). While the other kids draw pictures, she fills a page with nothing but numbers. As I said, the premise is flawed. Why her? Why did they pick her idea? Why did she write numbers down when she could have drawn a picture of the catastrophes to come, particularly in 2009?
OK, ignore that and flash forward to 2009. The time capsule is opened and each of the kids gets an envelope. A little boy named Caleb gets her letter. His father happens to be John Koestler, an astrophysicist at MIT (played by Nicolas Cage). The kid is disappointed in getting a page of numbers but, for some reason, doesn’t turn his letter in to his school like all of the other kids are required to. He brings it home where dad accidentally sees it and decides to look at patterns in it. He notices one that says 91101 with a number following. Indeed, this reveals September 11, 2001, and the next number is the number of casualties on that fateful day. Koestler spends all night figuring out the pattern but there are still numbers left. Guess what? The numbers coincide with the latitude and longitude coordinates of the disaster. What’s the problem here? Oh where do I start? Why didn’t the 1959 girl just write the city name? What qualifies as a disaster? How did she end up with a daughter, strange as she is? OK, I’ll stop here.
The adventure starts here. The letter still shows a series of three dates still to come, all in 2009. This is the story of how Koestler tries to stop the disasters. He enlists help: the daughter of the 1959 girl and her daughter. The rest of the film is a little E.T. and a lot a typical disaster movie. It is actually a good movie in the commercial science fiction sense. That is because it’s PG-13 so there isn’t too much violence. You can take the older kids as long as you let them know that this is just a movie. But, as I said, this isn’t great. It is not as good as E.T., The Sixth Sense, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, or even The Star Trek films. It is far better than Children of Men or Mission to Mars. Also, the music gets in the way. But go ahead and see it because it is good movie science fiction.