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I'm surprised that Roger Ebert gave this film 4 stars in his review, since the movie looks like a bad Roland Emmerich film. He calls it one of the most intelligent sci-fi movies ever. Is this the case of Ebert having a bias for Proyas or is the movie good? I know Ebert is not always the best critic, (he also gave Watchmen 4 stars) but he is respectable enough. The movie right now has 17% at Rottentomatoes.

By the way, I liked both Dark City and the Crow, but almost everything else Proyas has done has been mediocre at best.

dx23 wrote:I know Ebert is not always the best critic, (he also gave Watchmen 4 stars) but he is respectable enough.

I was about to post 'but he gave Watchmen four stars' but you beat me to it.

Ebert isn't really that respectable these days. He gives everything 4 stars, so much that he has completely devalued any prestige that might have come with that rating. Also, I have difficulty imagining someone in reality with similar taste to him. It's easier to picture someone with Armond taste than Ebert's. I guess maybe if you're extra easily pleased, maybe.

This film will probably be terrible. I know this is a shallow thing to harp on, but has anyone else noticed how terrible the special effects look in the trailer? When I watched it, the train sequence just looked...off. I rewatched that section when the trailer was over and burst out laughing. Just completely ridiculous. The plane looks pretty crummy as well. To be fair, the CG probably wasn't finished when the trailer was cut, but I doubt it has improved much.

Ebert will always be one of the movie critic greats, and has made an awesome contribution to this world. Sadly, I think he simply can't be trusted anymore. I'm not his psychiatrist and it's pure speculation to attribute it to his medical struggles but it's obvious that for whatever medical/psychological/general life reason he has become an incredibly easy lay for awful movies. Some of his positive reviews over the past three years are beyond mind-boggling.

Ebert's in the bag for Alex Proyas. He did a commentary for Dark City furchrissakes.

Ebert can't understand how this is getting negative reviews.

He should have let his original review stand as the proof of the courage of his convictions. That was just... pathetic

there are really only 2 sources for movie reviews/ratings that I usually use. One is AMG the other one is Roger Ebert. They always seemed most accurate and fair and coincide with each other about 90% of the time. I was surprised as everyone else when Ebert gave the film the highest possible rating. I don't think it's the worst movie but i could still recommend it (because of its world creation theory etc... ).
What was even more surprsing to me is that AMG (all media guide) gave the film the lowest possible rating (1 star). That's the website that gave Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever 2 stars! And Ebert gave it same rating as he did Citizen Kane.

Not to defend Ebert's insanity, but he has said that he rates on the merits of genre, so he's not throwing Knowing in the same room as Citizen Kane.

I thought I'd throw my impressions of this film up on the site, since I haven't discussed it yet. It is not perhaps Alex Proyas's best sci-fi film (that would be the dizzying sci-fi noir Dark City), but an interesting piece of 'apocalypse porn' which maintains a pretty relentlessly grim fatalistic tone throughout even as events spiral out into craziness. A big problem is that it occasionally has some pretty iffy CGI-effects. These occur mainly in the disaster sequences of the airplane crash and train derailment, which presents cartoon characters getting splatted bloodlessly by the events, which presumably is intended to 'sanitise' horrible events so that a mainstream audience can witness them, but strangely causes the scenes to come across as less caring of human beings because of that glorying in the spectacle of flashy carnage, while also being weirdly hilarious due to its phoniness!

Yet the 'one-on-one' apocalypse scenes, such as those involving the son, his visions and the mysterious men, come across extremely vividly, and the climactic events that Rose Byrne and Nicholas Cage's characters face get portrayed with much more skill. So for all of its world shattering 'everything is connected' events, this is a weirdly insular film with an otherworldly off-kilter atmosphere. Which isn't entirely a bad thing, I hasten to add, but that only makes me wonder more whether Proyas has much skill in building in and dealing with the wider world beyond his characters, and Dark City doesn't really help in this regard due to its own solipsistic twist similarly showing little feeling for any supporting players in its world! (Which in a way pairs Knowing and Dark City neatly together thematically)

I also really liked the brutal pragmatism (extremely well played by Cage) of the 'anti-Close Encounters' climax in which the 'happy ending' there of a father abandoning his family gets reversed!

colinr0380 wrote:I thought I'd through my impressions of this film up on the site, since I haven't discussed it yet. It is not perhaps Alex Proyas's best sci-fi film (that would be the dizzying sci-fi noir Dark City), but an interesting piece of 'apocalypse porn' which maintains a pretty relentlessly grim fatalistic tone throughout even as events spiral out into craziness. A big problem is that it occasionally has some pretty iffy CGI-effects. These occur mainly in the disaster sequences of the airplane crash and train derailment, which presents cartoon characters getting splatted bloodlessly by the events, which presumably is intended to 'sanitise' horrible events so that a mainstream audience can witness them, but strangely causes the scenes to come across as less caring of human beings because of that glorying in the spectacle of flashy carnage (while also being weirdly hilarious due to its phoniness!).

Yet the 'one-on-one' apocalypse scenes, such as those involving the son, his visions and the mysterious men, come across extremely vividly, and the climactic events that Rose Byrne and Nicholas Cage's characters face get portrayed with much more skill. So for all of its world shattering 'everything is connected' events, this is a weirdly insular film with an otherworldly off-kilter atmosphere. Which isn't entirely a bad thing, I hasten to add, but that only makes me wonder more whether Proyas has much skill in building in and dealing with the wider world beyond his characters, and Dark City doesn't really help in this regard due to its own solipsistic twist similarly showing little feeling for any supporting players in its world! (Which in a way pairs Knowing and Dark City neatly together thematically)

I also really liked the brutal pragmatism (extremely well played by Cage) of the 'anti-Close Encounters' climax in which the 'happy ending' there of a father abandoning his family gets reversed!

I used to be a huge fan of Proyas, and i would even defend I, Robot way harder than i should of but Knowing was the film that broke me. It was finally the point where i felt he lost it, and while it showed hints of the director whose work i loved, it felt like he gave up. I remember thinking the ending in particular seemed to directly go against everything in his oeuvre up until that point. Maybe that was the point though? Like you mentioned that film is definitely connected to Dark City and they kind of play like inverses of each other. For example, Dark City was all about being in control of your destiny, while Knowing is all about inevitability. The film ultimately ends on the note of "in the scheme of things, you don't really matter" which seems like a big departure for the guy who made Dark City. At the time it just seemed lazy but now i wonder if that was just him accepting his place. If you think of it in terms of career and the fact he hasn't completed a project in the remaining 5 years since, it's very possible that was just how he felt by that point in time. I still remember the bad effects like you mentioned, the general lack of an interesting visual style throughout, and the performances being all over the place but at least i can now see there was probably something more personal going on there than i had thought.

Proyas is still an interesting director though more so for his potential than his actual work at the end of the day. Going into the 2000's, it seemed like he would have a career like David Fincher or Christopher Nolan have now but he was never really able to fulfill it. He hasn't even really had the career of other less prolific directors like Mark Romanek or Jonathan Glatzer who were also stylish video directors turned feature directos. It's just been a few interesting failures, and a lot of projects that have never got off the ground.

malpractice wrote:I remember thinking the ending in particular seemed to directly go against everything in his oeuvre up until that point. Maybe that was the point though? Like you mentioned that film is definitely connected to Dark City and they kind of play like inverses of each other. For example, Dark City was all about being in control of your destiny, while Knowing is all about inevitability. The film ultimately ends on the note of "in the scheme of things, you don't really matter" which seems like a big departure for the guy who made Dark City.

I sort of feel that the ending is the most successful part of the film, with the mysterious opening half to three-quarters conspiracy thriller-style busy work that is never going to affect or change the course of events (perhaps the closest companion film to Knowing isn't any sci-fi but that paranoid conspiracy thriller Arlington Road!). Even though Cage figures everything out, he is powerless to help any of the people involved in either of the disasters he puts himself in the epicentre of and in that quite touching final sequence he is just as much a part of the crowd of panicking looters running through the streets of New York, except with more of a sense of futility. His character seems intended to be contrasted as the intellect in between the girl from the 50s inexplicably tormented by all of the visions of dates of future disasters and the religious family he has broken from, who calmly embrace the futility of their existence as what has been planned for them.

Spoiler

In fact I love the moment when Cage's character gets to his family home and is met by his sister, who asks where his son is, with the response being that "he's safe". Which doesn't get followed up on, and while it is actually a happy ending, I could see it coming across to the sister that John had perhaps already killed his son to spare him the upcoming disaster. When in fact the son has already 'ascended' in a quite literal sense!

I don't really think of the fatalism of Knowing as too different from Proyas's previous films. I, Robot is still in my 'to watch' pile, so I can't really speak to that, but his other sci-fi films are about 'old worlds' collapsing for new ones to come into being, particularly Dark City but also The Crow is literally about a man whose resurrection for revenge when achieved will lead him back to the grave, and peace, but who also in doing so helps to cleanse the city of its criminal elements for future generations. Similarly Knowing destroys the entire planet only to re-seed it elsewhere which, to go back to the religious undercurrents running through it, is an updated Noah's ark tale. (Perhaps there is a think-piece to be written about the reason behind the number of Noah's ark films in the last decade, includng Noah itself and Evan Almighty. I would also add that Knowing pairs up well when set against that remake of The Day The Earth Stood Still from the previous year (featuring previous Proyas actor Jennifer Connelly) which features world ending genocide in a more problematic manner!)

I think that you are right though that this is the difference from the earlier films, in that Cage is a proactive hero, and acts like the classical hero, but is one that the film doesn't pay much heed to, unlike either Dark City or The Crow in which the hero starts off powerless but ends by holding power over narrative, and eventually power to re-shape the entire direction of the film, in their hands. Here Cage's character has control over the reins of the narrative of the film we are watching, but the important world-changing events are always taking place outside of his sphere of influence (a bit more like, say, William Hurt's police inspector supporting character from Dark City).