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There's nothing really special about this film, other than an interesting premise.
Things started to fall off of the deep end very quickly.
If Alex Proyas' Knowing were reasonably entertaining -- instead of just dour, pointless and tedious -- it would be a camp classic.
If you want to know how inept the movie is...well, it's so inept that you may wish you were watching an M. Night Shyamalan version of the very same premise.
The movie begins shameless, grows stupid and winds up silly. If the ending had less of the air of a crackpot religion and more pretentiousness, you could almost call it Shyamalanish.
An uneasy blending of sci-fi and religion, fate and faith -- the same mish-mash that has bedeviled most of M. Night Shyamalan's recent movies, and leaves this film leaden with self-importance.
A damned entertaining movie despite the fact that it stars Nicholas Cage.
A shotgun spray of metaphysics, cosmology, the Old Testament, flying saucers, angels, spooky blonde-haired men in black trench coats, mysterious little black rocks, two cute kids and a moose on fire.
If those space-dudes are so friendly, why drive children insane with a bunch of weird code? Why not just show up on The Tonight Show and tell everybody the exact date and time? Lame! Also: Why fake Massachusetts? Why not just say: 'This is Australia.'
Knowing is about faith; the belief that one day the mysteries of the universe will be explained to us, and the knowledge that anything is possible.
It's a folly and a failure, but an intriguing one - an ambitious vision from a tremendous filmmaker that, sadly, had too much going on with not enough to say.
A slog through lazy writing, indifferent acting and blase direction with no hope of anything but chaotic violence as reward.
A broad, leisurely jumble of Alfred Hitchcock-style suspense architecture and a dreary, paint-by-numbers Sci-Fi Channel Original, Knowing only seems to extract two reactions: nail-biting and eye-rolling.
... starts off as director Alex Proyas's take on "Final Destination" before going all "Close Encounters" on us. If only we hadn't seen it all before.
Basically two movies wrestling around in a burlap bag full of rocks: one an ambitious, big-idea sci-fi yarn, the other a horror movie as dumb as ... well, that's where those rocks come in.
Pay attention to Mr. Proyas' lighting and set design as well as the intense disaster sequences that dot Knowing: As with the rest of his oeuvre, the movie looks great.
This year's prize for most ludicrous set-up and most ludicrous punchline
Knowing feels like a bunch of cool ideas that were strewn about a table, picked up, shoved together, tied up with duct tape and, somehow, managed to stay working for the ride.
Knowing is a bit of a revelation. Against all odds, it's not actually half bad.
Even with its intriguing, sci-fi-ish setup Knowing finds a way of consistently striking all the wrong notes.
Excessive finale aside, its novel concept makes for a mental and action package worth seeing.
[Blu-Ray DVD Review]Watch it for the spectacle of destruction. Mock it for Cage and his hair. Forget it as soon as it's over.
Among the most troubling elements of 'Knowing' are its dark cinematography, outlandish plot, and a less-than-memorable performance by Nicolas Cage.
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