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Knowing |  | Actors: Nicolas Cage, Rose Byrne
Studio: Summit Entertainment
Category: DVD
List Price: $19.99
Buy Used: $1.84
as of 3/13/2010 14:40 CET details
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Seller: moviesandgamestore
Rating:  324 reviews
Sales Rank: 1585
Format: AC-3, Color, Dolby, Dubbed, DVD, NTSC, Subtitled, Widescreen
Languages: English (Original Language), English (Unknown), English (Subtitled), Spanish (Subtitled), Spanish (Dubbed)
Rating: PG-13 (Parental Guidance Suggested)
Region: 1
Aspect Ratio: 2.35:1
Number Of Discs: 1
Running Time: 121 Minutes
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.3
Dimensions (in): 7.4 x 5.3 x 0.7
MPN: 66110365
UPC: 025192031885
EAN: 0025192031885
ASIN: B001GCUO02
Theatrical Release Date: March 20, 2009
Release Date: July 7, 2009
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
A TEACHER OPENS A TIME CAPSULE THAT HAS BEEN DUG UP AT HIS SON'E ELEMENTARY SCHOOL. IN IT ARE SOME CHILLING PREDICTIONS - SOME THAT HAVE ALREADY OCCURRED & OTHERS THAT ARE ABOUT TO - THAT LEAD HIM TO BELIEVE HIS FAMILY PLAYS A ROLE IN THE EVENTS THAT ARE ABOUT TO UNFOLD.
Amazon.com
Nicolas Cage stars in this largely unsatisfying science-fiction tale that begins as a taut and spooky story concerning psychic legacies and ends up falling back on Steven Spielberg's old, cosmic playbook for default explanations about weird phenomena. Cage stars as astrophysicist and widower John Koestler, whose young son attends a school where a 50-year-old time capsule is dug up and opened. Koestler's son, Caleb (Chandler Canterbury), is given an envelope from the capsule containing a sheet of paper inscribed with seemingly-random numbers. Koestler interprets groupings of the numbers as prophesies (made in 1959) of disasters leading up to a globally catastrophic event late in 2009. Moreover, some of the later tragedies involve him or members of his family, suggesting the paper was meant to fall into his and Caleb's hands. That’s not the only freaky thing drawing father and son in a direction they really don't want to go. Among other things, a quartet of mute strangers keeps showing up with a powerful interest in Caleb's whereabouts, and the daughter and granddaughter of the little girl who originally scribbled those numbers in 1959 are under the shadow of a separate prediction of doom. Everything goes swimmingly until it's time for director Alex Proyas (The Crow) to begin tying up all the strings, and cliches start falling like rain. On the plus side, Knowing includes a couple of breathtaking scenes of calamity, the most horrifying (and realistic) of which is a jet crash the likes of which has never been committed to film. --Tom Keogh
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Showing reviews 1-5 of 324
 Knowing how NOT to make a movie READ THIS ONE FIRST BEFORE THE OTHER FIRSTS! March 13, 2010
Mathew Mark Luke John
I was honestly very hopeful that when I bought Knowing (after waiting for the price to drop) that it might be a movie I could watch more than once and enjoy. Not even close. Not because it had that 6th Sense kind of quality where once you know the ending you can't really get into it. This simply was a blandly written and poorly directed movie where Nicholas Cage was not at his best. In fact, his timing and mechanics were way off and it looked as if the director was afraid to direct him. Cage's character never really becomes anyone worth relating to. No flashbacks, boring or absent dialog, no personality, no supporting characters with any character, even his son is as boring as dirt. The best actors were the ones in the beginning before the marque actors showed up. You can blame the writers for the poor character development but also Cage looked as if he mailed it in, which for him is still pretty passable, but Cage could only handle the basics and many of his motions looked telegraphed. That took us out of the movie a few times but was forgivable. What was really poor were the missed opportunities this movie presented coupled with the far reaching stupidity of the overall plot once you knew where it was going. I even held out hope for a long time that it wouldn't go where I worried it was going but at every turn it continued to go straight ahead into oblivion. It didn't help that everything up to the ending was completely superfluous to the ending.
PLOT WARNING: The beginning started out promising. We had children making pictures for a school time capsule but one child seems disturbed and makes a list of numbers. All the pictures are placed in the capsule. Fifty years later in the present time the capsule is open and Cage's son gets the letter with the strange list of numbers. After some boring dialog and a very sloppy and poorly choreographed spill of Cage's drink on the paper, Cage becomes interested in the list of numbers. He quickly deduces their meaning despite having no clear epiphany moment and never bringing us on the journey of his mind. He simply figures it out. It's a list of tragedies that have all come true except the few set for the next few days. Better directing, a few more scenes and deeper dialog could have made this part a great part of the movie. MISSED. They could have made the discovery enjoyable but they seemed too hurried to present what came next. NOTHING. Sure there are plane crashes and mysterious visitors but the director found every way possible to strain the suspense out all of it, mostly by never building the characters or adding the necessary dialog to connect them or make them interesting. The same held true for the plot where we had a lot of intriguing events that were never logically threaded together. It was looking like another Wicker Man as you finally realize that the ending was going to make the journey a waste. And it was a waste. Cage goes off following the path of destruction stopping nothing and saving no one during what should have been a series of very suspenseful events. The director missed a ton of opportunities to make this a real thriller but at the end of this tail-chasing exercise Cage discovers that these predictions can't be stopped and no one can be saved. These silly stones appear which turn out to mean nothing. The visitors show up at times to take the children and could but don't and instead haunt them with voices and visions and possession. The predictions come true and the last one predicts the end of the world. Another unexplainable epiphany leads Cage to discover the cause which is a solar flare. No stopping that so we realize the world is going to end. For some unknown reason Cage knows that the government will tell everyone and for some stupid reason the government does. Then the movie really goes flat as Cage again chases his tail and has another unexplained epiphany sending Cage to find some missing numbers that return him to a location where the visitors would leave from. The writers then unnecessarily kill off the one supporting actress that was building some character. Cage watches her die then catches up to the visitors using the numbers. The kids writing the numbers never needed them since the visitors were simply going up to the kids wherever they were and the kids did not know what the numbers meant anyways. The numbers didn't help Cage since everything still came true and Cage was not allowed to go on the spaceship since he was not called by these very selective visitors. Cage arrives in time to say goodbye and watch the aliens take his kid along with his now dead friend's kid to a new world with a bunch of other kids and animals in ships in a Noah's Ark type of event. A not so tearful goodbye as the heartless aliens won't take Cage and then they are off. Cage returns home to his estranged family who are estranged for no reason. The predictions served absolutely no purpose in the movie since the kids did not know of them and the predictions did not lead to anything positive. The visitors take the kids and the reason for the predictions? They simply come true. Cage's son actually has to say the prediction were meant to prepare them in some way just to give these useless predictions meaning to the movie goer which of course if you have to say it then it did not. Why are the last three tragedies centered around Cage's character anyways when there were ships leaving from all over the Earth supposedly with other kids? The predictions from the aliens are meant to be intriguing but again have no affect on the outcome. In the end Cage's son goes off to a new world where they have tall grass and a big tree of life in the center which I guess was meant to give us an Adam and Eve feel. The Earth is then engulfed by a solar flare with some nice effects that came way too late.
I could have given this movie two stars but this movie should have been a 4 or 5 so they are losing a star for screwing up a free lunch. They had opportunity all over the place. Let Cage save the world! Let him struggle a little more to figure things out then let it mean something. Make the death toll numbers a little off to account for human error vs alien exactness. Make the predictions important to the outcome and when Cage figure's it out let him make SOME difference. Let Cage take over an alien ship. Anything but a list of unchangeable predictions provided by a group of antisocial aliens for absolutely no reason except there is a movie audience. I settle for slapping Cage's agent for going from Adaptation to Weather Man to Wicker Man to Ghost Rider to this. There is a disturbing trend to Cage's selections as he has gone from stretching himself with fringe and unpopular roles with descent actors like Adaptation and The Weather Man to unfinished plots with unsatisfying endings. Now I need to find another movie to satisfy my sci-fi fix and Cage is left to fix his finances and decide if he wants to make a movie worth watching ever again.
Great Special Effects March 8, 2010
Dee from Brighton, MI (USA)
This movie was good, until the end with the aliens. What I really liked about this movie were the special effects. Excellent with the subway disaster and the crashing plane. I was blown away by the special effects and I love the acating of Nicholas Cage.
 Knowing has 20 minutes of thrills and way to much Cage. March 1, 2010
Haunted Flower (Indianapolis)
Knowing DVD Review
1 Disc Widescreen Edition (2009)Knowing poster
Oh boy. Nicholas Cage. *Cracks knuckles* Let's get down to business.
Knowing was directed by Alex Proyas who has brought us such gems in the past as I, Robot and The Crow so he knows how to tell a mystery story. I thought he did a ok job bringing the movie together, but both the plot and lead actor had some flaws.
The story follows Nicholas Cage's son gets a piece of paper out of a time capsule that has a series of numbers covering the whole thing. By coincidence, Cage notices a few numbers match up with a date and number of casualties of a news worthy tragedy. Soon he is dissecting the whole sheet like a mad man and looking up every other sequence to match it with another tragic event where lives are lost. It absolutely kills me that he is supposed to be an astronomer/professor/numbers guru and takes sooooo long to consider that the section of numbers at the end of each sequence could be coordinates to the location of the disaster. Why isn't that his first guess? I thought he was supposed to be genius level. It's already hard to get past that surfer dude accent so please don't dumb this down for the audience, we're all way ahead of you.
This movie is hard to watch only because of Nicholas Cage. There are some movies I have enjoyed him in (City of Angels oddly enough and sometimes Ghost Rider), but all in all he is always playing the same guy with the same surfer voice! The supporting actors don't and probably can't make up for this because they aren't given much to work with. They are solely there for Cage to talk to and think out loud around because he's in almost every scene.
If you can ignore him, this movie is worth watching for a very small handful of sequences. Get past the boring stuff and watch for a plane crashing beside a highway and people running out of it engulfed in flames! Amazing, terrifying, heart-breaking, and exhilarating all at the same time. There are creepy no-face men stalking Cage's son and handing out black stones and they give a couple good scares. Anytime there is a special effects destruction scene, it makes it worth sitting through the rest because they look amazing and we all love some good old-fashioned explosions and destruction, don't we?
I expected this movie to end the way a lot of these destruction movies do but I was pleasantly surprised to see them stay the course and not make up a deux ex machina at the end. I respect that. The plot I blow a raspberry at. The visual effects made me sit up and take notice. I could've cut this movie down to 20 minutes tops to see the good parts.
Disc Extras:
For such a big disaster movie idea and special effects, you'd think the audio commentary with the director would be interested but honestly it was so boring that about two-thirds though I turned it off. He's a dry, boring speaker and the other person with him has to keep prompting him for general information about the film people might be interested in. There's a making-of feature that talks about how these actors came to be cast in this film and how the little girl plays two parts. The most interesting part of that feature is showing how the airplane crash sequence was shot. For all you fanatics into doomsday predictions, there's a feature called "Visions of the Apocalypse" that goes over how accurate the information portrayed in the film is to actual events in time and how ancient people over time viewed the coming of the end of the world and is probably the most interesting extra on the dvd for history buffs.
 DEJA VU March 1, 2010
Stevie Tee
I've only just got around to seeing this film/movie (March 2010). A competent film of its type. The CGI was not too cardboard and generally realistic. This story is not an uplifting one but then it could never be. I haven't read all the reviews - too many - so someone else might have picked up the flavour of Childhood's End by Arthur C Clarke. I read it years ago so I can't remember if there was the prediction element, but I certainly remember being very depressed by it for some time. But, hey, if we expected every film/story to be jolly, we'd all be deserving of deletion from the planet.
Stevie
Breakneck Tension, Out-a-site Effects, Bummer Ending March 1, 2010
Ken Douglas (Landlocked in Reno)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
It's 1959 and to celebrate the first year of a Lexington, Mass elementary school the students are asked to draw a picture of what they think the future will look like in fifty years. Most of the kids draw rockets, but not Lucinda Embry. She starts writing down numbers at an alarming rate, but when the teachers tells them times up, she keeps going, trying to get that last number out, but teach takes the paper before she can finish. Lucinda disappears and is found later, fingers bloody scratching on the inside of a closet door.
Flash forward to the present day and we see John Koestler (Nicholas Cage) teaching a class in astrophysics at MIT. During this lesson we learn he believes there is no divine order, everything is random. We later learn his father's a minister, who obviously has different beliefs. They have not spoken in years. Koestler's son Calib hears voices, whispers and guess what elementary school he goes to. Yep, you guessed it.
Now it's time to open that time capsule and each of the kids gets one envelope with a drawing from half a decade ago. Guess what envelope Calib gets. Yep, no drawing for Caleb. He gets those numbers and that night dad figures them out. They've predicted every major disaster over the last fifty years. There are three left. Can John change what Lucinda has predicted.
He's going to try.
Okay, that's a pretty good set up for a story. Had me and Vesta glued to our seats. We were sitting up close and let me tell you the special effects were so doggone good they were scary, but could you expect anything less from the man who directed I Robot. Alex Proyas seems to have been born to direct this kind of movie. Cage was born to play in it. The horror on his face as the plane crashes in front of him is real. He's nailed this roll. But unfortunately he shouldn't have been in it and Alex Proyas shouldn't have directed it. Don't get me wrong, they've done great work, but in my opinion nobody could have saved this movie from the bummer ending.
The first two thirds of this move are simply outstanding. Tension, tension and more tension. And when that plane falls from the sky, you are there like you've never been in any movie plane crash before. And the subway disaster, jeez Marie that was scary stuff. Even the boy meets girl stuff doesn't detract from the excitement, then it all goes away with that bummer ending.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 324
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