Are we here by a series of random accidents and mistakes? Or, is there a grand purpose to our existence? These are the important questions that Professor John Koestler (Nicolas Cage) asks his students, and himself, in ‘Knowing’.
Cage is fine in the role of a concerned, hyper-excited single parent, but the manner in which he gets worked up so easily makes it hard for one to imagine him as a rational MIT astrophysicist. Chandler, who plays his son, is exactly what his character requires him to be: a sweet kid with a sad, innocent face, to make him endearing to the spectator.
At an elementary school, in 1959, children are given papers and asked to draw their perception of the world in 2009. One of them instead frantically scribbles numerical digits. The papers are then sealed in a time capsule. Half a century later, the capsule is opened and the papers are distributed among the new students.
The film fails to satisfactorily explain a lot of things.
Why did someone or something forcefully feed prophetic encrypted messages into a little child’s brain? If they are such nice creatures, why did they have to scare her and bloody all her fingers, in the process? Couldn’t they simply have handed her a pen and paper with a smile?
Is it simply by coincidence that, fifty years later, the professor’s son, Caleb (Chandler Canterbury), receives the scribbled page? Or, is it by some divine design?
Did someone simply want to give the recipient’s dad a mental slap for his wrong belief? Else, if it is the professor’s destiny to read and decipher the code—patterns in the numbers reveal dates of major disasters that occurred in the past fifty years as well as the exact death toll figures—what good does this bit of knowledge do for anyone?
If you’re such an advanced species, don’t you have sufficient brains to write things in a language that people can understand? Why the need for such complications and secrecy? And if you’re anyway planning to blow up the whole world, surely this entire coded exercise is a waste of everyone’s time, yours included?
Like the scribbling, the sounds, and the happenings, Alex Proyas’ apocalyptic/chosen-one film too is weird and makes absolutely no sense. It takes the side of the argument that “everything has an order to it and is determined”, but fails to say anything that’s worth knowing.
