Knowing is an imaginative piece that flashes some potential, but it leaves the viewer unsatisfied in the end as it fails to fully deliver on said potential.
Knowing really does have some potential and some intriguing sequences. The movie begins with a whole flash-black cold open deal. Students in 1959 are placing pictures inside of a time capsule of a Boston area elementary school. Well, all the students except for Lucinda Embry, whose contribution to this is a paper filled with numbers. The movie tries it’s best to creep you out here. Now flash-forward to 2009 and the time capsule is being opened and its contents passed about to eager students. Lucinda’s creepy number art is handed out to Caleb Koestler (Chandler Canterbury) and is subsequently seen by his astrophysicist and MIT professor father, John Koestler (Nicholas Cage). John eventually realizes the numbers on the paper mean something and he connects them to past horrific events. As the plot of the movie requires, there are also dates that haven’t come to fruition yet. John sets out to investigate and eventually encounters the now deceased Lucinda’s daughter and granddaughter, Diana (Rose Byrne) and Abby (Lara Robinson). Together the four band together to figure out what the last cryptic message on the paper means. While this is happening Abby and Caleb are stalked by mysterious figures who seem to have a part to play in the grander scheme of the movie. It all comes to ahead in some intriguing yet questionable ways.
With all that said this movie falls eventually into an apocalypse film. It does enough to keep your attention, but it ends up trying to make certain moments impactful, but lack of some character development holds this back. This is an issue not really with the two main characters of John and Diana but with most of the supporting characters including John’s father and sister, and the mysterious figures that are after the children. The acting is decent enough. There were some very funny faces that the actors clearly had to make toward a green screen. Byrne felt a little underused as she does a very fine job as the daughter of a crazy woman who is just trying to live a normal life, and her characters action’s make sense.
It feels like they tried to put a bit too much in this movie in terms of plot and characters relationships. They want you to know about John and his father, John and his son, John and Diana, Diana and Lucinda, John and his skeptical co-worker, the children and the mysterious figures. It just gets a bit bloated and if they had confined it, even made it into a love flick revolving around John and Diana, they could’ve got farther. Not to mention they forcibly connect the major event at the end of the film with biblical prophecy. Also, it should be noted that what comes at the end of the film is considered more scientifically impossible that an asteroid the size of Texas being jagged and sharp (Gravity lesson…an object the size of Texas in space would be spherical in shape).
On the 4K factor there is nothing remarkable to report. The film looks pretty, and its high action sequences are solid in higher resolution. However, this movie once again proves that 4K can’t overcome story and character problems.
Knowing comes together to make a decent you have to clean your house and need some background noise movie, but not much more. Despite pieces being there for it to be something it ultimately falls short of the emotional impact it was trying to evoke in it’s audiences.
