Knowing | 
 enlarge | Actors: Nicolas Cage, Rose Byrne
Studio: Summit Entertainment
Category: DVD
List Price: $19.99
Buy Used: $1.89
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Rating:  323 reviews
Sales Rank: 2864
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 323
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.
SHould have been a 1 Hour Cable Movie March 1, 2010
P. B Rubalcaba (Redlands, CA USA)
I loved it...but it was much t-o-o long. It could have been a 60-minute special on cable. The special effects (particularly the plane crash on the highway) were spectacular, but the in-between scenes were l-o-n-g and boring. Nicolas Cage has been much better in his previous films...this one he shows how lethargic he can be...almost like he wasn't too thrilled to star in this lazy sci-fi sleeper. Don't get me wrong, it had its moments...but it seemed to rob and steal from other flicks...like "Close Encounters of the Third Kind". I'm not sure why the children had little rabbits when they were escorted to a new planet...but the ending just didn't seem to fit the drum roll I was expecting. This film was all over the place. It is worth a rental, but not a buy. Nicolas can do much better than this. Granted, he's not the heart-throb of "Moonstruck" anymore, but he needs to be cast in quality films. This one was poorly scripted and edited. I hate to see actors lower themselves to this level after so many years of success.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 323
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