Few days ago, I decided to visit the cinema, after a somewhat long break. The Palms was its usual busy self, as it was a little bit difficult to manuvoure through the teeming crowd. There was a queue at the counter when I arrived at the Genesis Deluxe Cinemas, even though I was unsure of which movie to see, I just joined the queue.
Eventually, I settled for Knowing, the one I thought would be most interesting to see, considering the other options on offer.
The movie opens with an odd, little looking girl in 1959 putting a page full of numbers into her school’s time-capsule that is going to be opened in 50 years time.
Similarly, in the same year, as part of the dedication ceremony for a new elementary school, a group of students is asked to draw pictures to be stored in a time-capsule. But this mysterious little girl, who seems to hear whispered voices, fills her sheet of paper with rows of apparently random numbers instead.
The movie is fast forwarded 50 years to the present where a new generation of students has to examine the contents of the time-capsule and the little girl's cryptic message ends up in the hands of young Caleb Myles. But it is Caleb's father, Professor Ted Myles, played by Nicolas Cage, who makes the startling discovery that the encoded message predicts with pinpoint accuracy the dates, death tolls and coordinates of every major disaster of the past 50 years.
As Ted further unravels, the document's secrets foretell three additional events - the last of which hint at destruction on a global scale and seem to somehow involve Ted and his son.
Ted's attempts to alert the authorities fall on deaf ears, and he takes it upon himself to try to prevent more destruction from taking place. Through happenstance, Ted has his attention drawn to a certain string on the page which seems to have predicted the World Trade Centre 9/11 tragedy.
As he looks up the numbers, he finds that the predictions are all accurate, and there are only three left. Becoming instantly obsessed, Ted tries to figure out the meaning behind the unbelievable numbers, which eventually leads him to the daughter and grandchild of that original mysterious little girl of 1959.
It also leads him to an attempt to prevent one of the tragedies, which doesn’t go quite according to plan. Of course, there are also the mysterious and foreboding people who suddenly seem to be stalking Ted and his son.
This gripping supernatural thriller charts one man's faltering steps towards belief in the ultimate order of the universe, even as he finds himself surrounded by mounting chaos. With the reluctant help from Diana Whelan and Abby, the daughter and granddaughter of the now-deceased author of the cryptic prophecies, Ted's desperate efforts take him on a heart-pounding race against time until he finds himself facing the ultimate disaster-and the ultimate sacrifice of leaving his only son in care of aliens.
Whatever one’s thought on the ultimate story that is played out in Knowing, it’s a film that everyone should see even though the rationale behind the script writer’s conclusion was very much unclear.
For me, the movie seemed to be giving some sort of unclear answers to the questions it raised. It’s just asking questions. The story paid homage to the age-old battle between those who “know” and those who just keep asking questions.
Socrates was the gadfly in that school of thought in Plato’s Socrates Dialogues, because he kept asking questions from those who “knew” until he discovered that those who claimed to know in reality knew nothing.
Most philosophers wonder if there is any physical world at all, and what implications that there might be if there isn’t. Scientists, lay people, and other philosophers scoff at such thought and go on being merry.
The next thing they discovered is that the physical world is nothing like it seems, but if we only ask so many questions we get answers we can more or less deal with.
Philosophy, religion, and science keep asking more and more questions that have led to some kind of bizarre ideas and discoveries, as answering the questions is neither here nor there. In the movie, a curiosity of the religious debate is that “it’s either there is God, and there’s no free will, or there is no God and there’s free will. If God knows everything, he knows everything that is going to happen, hence there’s no free will.”
This may be a hard question to tackle, as we all know there is God but that free will may not be absolute. What does knowing mean if man does not have control over anything and he has limited knowledge?
Someone who is trying to do some real work on figuring out life might ask, suppose there is a God and he knows everything about the future of your life. Would we act differently? And, what does that imply for a general outlook on morality? What if there is no physical world? Where is God in that case? Could he show up here? The answer is, but there is a physical world. Someone might as well dismiss the idea that a few of us were captured by aliens and taken to another world where our identities were implanted into us, and we run around like rats in mazes.
If you pay attention to what Knowing is all about, you will find it’s really a great movie. It’s intense though, engaging, intriguing, crafted with brilliance and subtlety. It also features some remarkable special effects sequences, many of which are brilliant and beautiful for their non-realism in something like the way you might think of a darling.
If you sort of pay attention to what it’s about, it’s a fun trip, even if it’s a crazy kind of ride. If you really focus on what it’s about, it’s either tremendously stupid, or mastermind. But, the first rule of knowing is that you can’t deny the hypothetical. But the movie left me to resolve the riddle of the existence of a physical world and a God whose power is beyond human knowledge.
