Knowing
From Merriam-Webster’s:
Main Entry: knowing
Function: noun
Date: 14th century
: acquaintance , cognizance
The Nicholas Cage film, Knowing, certainly deals with cognizance but not in the way we usually think of it. And the acquaintances are a bit on the odd side, too. But I won’t spoil the film for you by detailing that any further. Cage’s character, John Koestler [great name, had to be a conscious choice - Arthur Koestler being a 20th century writer who knew a thing or two about dangerous situations] is a physicist at MIT with a dead wife and precocious son named Caleb. The game begins when the 50 year time capsule at Caleb’s school is opened. The children are allowed to each open an envelope placed there by the first students. Caleb’s envelope happens to be a letter of a different sort — not the lovely childlike images of rocket ships and weird sombreros, but a page full of numbers. Enter papa, an alcohol impacted late night, and a mind that spots patterns in the row after row of numbers, the first one recognised being 9/11/2001. I’ll leave it to you to seek out the rest of the plot, or better yet, go see the film.
Critics here in Australia were not very impressed. I even heard one gave it only 1 star. Too bad if potential viewers buy that. I quite liked the film. I liked the characters. I liked the fact that Koestler finally got out of his own mire of grief and started focussing on the world’s problems, even though people weren’t aware necessarily that they had them. Cue global warming, or better yet, a sun with an over-active thyroid. How does one stop the end of the world?
One added fun aspect was that the film was shot in Melbourne! Yay! This is at least the second production Cage has done here. It’s fun to spot the landmark buildings and see how they managed to turn them into someplace in Massachusetts or New York City, complete with the cars driving down the right lane instead of left.
As we were leaving the theatre, a man in front of us turned around and said someone in their party was in the film. Whoa! Turns out it was one of the child extras from the elementary school scenes. Her proud father told us she had made it to the final four to play the young girl character, the friend of young Koestler. Only problem was this girl was blond. Wouldn’t have worked because the three generations of females, her being the youngest, were all dark. This girl would have played Rose Byrne’s daughter. Still, she was a cute kid and the family was pleased for her. They went off to take her photo in front of the poster.
If you like sci-fi, here-comes-the-end-of-the-world flicks, I recommend this one. Fast paced, well acted, an enjoyable evening with a somewhat hopeful ending. But you’ll have to see it yourself to see if you agree.