It maybe holywood but this is the speech of a true leader.

The Knowing – better off not

spoiler alert spoiler alert

There is something weird about Nicolas Cage. He is such a boring actor with no natural acting ability and no natural beauty. He has only got one style of acting, much like Jim Carrey and Tom Cruise. But he always gets to act in films that i really like. And it is the same with this film.

Minimalistically, Cage plays an alcoholic professor who stumbles across a code written 50 years previous that predicts the future. Sounds a bit hitch hatched, but it does make for an interesting film.

Aside from the basic plot, the best parts of the film are the fantastic and gory special effects. From the aeroplane crash when everyone in the cinema was expecting a lorry to crash through the toppled fuel tanker, to the disrailed subway train that squashes the commuters like flies. The scenes are not for the faint hearted, but are so amazingly protrayed. But they save what the makers hoped would be the best  till last, the effects of a solar flare reaching Earth and its subsequent destruction of everything in its path. It still didn’t beat the aeroplane crash for me though (it only reaffirmed my fear of flying).

There is a really big problem with this film though. The film tries to take on too many topics at once, horror, drama, triller, religion and sci-fi. Yeah yeah, they may only hint at religion. But it is the sci-fi that ruins the film for me, yet it is only the last 10 minutes that the sci-fi pops along. Throughout, the film hints that the mysterious men are either angels or demons, that the fact everyone is to die is because of the return of the Lord, and in the way this is what happens, but the way it happened literally sucked. The mysterious men that followed Cage’s son around were actually aliens, the coincidences that took Cage his son and their new found friends to a specific site were so they could take his child away to another planet to start the human race again (like Adam and Eve). It was dissapointing, it was cheesy. It actually ruined the film for me.

If it were me, i would keep the film exactly the same until the space ship is about to pop along to take the children away. Then instead of a spaceship the scene could end with the mysterious men doing something that involves a flash of light surrounding the group (that looks like it signifies something important) then cut away to the scene of the Earth being burned. Then end the film. This way we don’t know if they survived, we don’t know who the mystery men are who what they did, we don’t know why they were led to this place, we don’t know why this code was written or how. Essentially it would have been an ironic end for The Knowing for us not to know, and have left enough mystery to allow us to draw our own conclusions. Instead we see two children whose intention is to repopulate the human race running around a field on a new planet with the tree of life in the foreground. Dissapointing.