KNOWING… what?

I saw this movie last week.

The scenario is that this man finds this list of numbers that predicts all of the big disasters of the last fifty years and then sets about trying to prevent the last three predictions on the list. His whiney little son is somehow involved. There are also a couple of horrific and unnecessarily realistic and graphic scenes of mass death. At the end, the whole world gets fucked by a giant solar flare. Yes. Everyone dies.

Reasons why KNOWING is a pile of horseshit. (NB. KNOWING must always be written in capitals to denote its weighty sense of its own importance and deepitude).

1. Why is Hollywood so obsessed with disasters? Whether it’s natural disasters or otherwise, apparently we can’t get enough of random death on a large scale. Why is this? Granted, the knowledge of your own mortality is a terrible burden and it’s scary to think that your death will probably be random and pointless, blah blah. But is it really necessary to dwell on all the ways that we might die violently at the hands of nature/terrorists/a virus/monsters/freak accidents? Is this really entertainment?

2. Why is Hollywood so obsessed with numbers? We seem to be in the thrall of people who can make sense of numbers and mathematics and physics and shit and revere them as gods. Mathematicians. Numerologists. Austistic people. In a funny way, I think it’s the same as our fascination with disasters – both seem unknowable and incomprehensible. We are intrigued by an autistic person who knows thousands of prime numbers in the same way we are mesmerised by horrific tsunamis unfolding on the evening news. The random strikes again. Maybe if we break the code, we can stave off our own impending deaths.

3. Nicolas Cage. What happened? You were so good in Moonstruck and Adaptation. We know you can do better. So why do you make movies like National Treasure 2 and KNOWING? I truly don’t believe that when you die, you will feel like you made your contribution to society. You will feel like made a shitload of money. And foisted this nasty, stupid mish-mash of a disaster-death-fest on us. Dick. By the way, you don’t make a very plausible physicist.

4. So, at the end, this little boy and girl get taken away by some creepy guys with silvery skin and bleached hair like Spike from Buffy. The dudes then shed their skin and turn into glowing beings re: The X-Files. They take the kids onto this big spaceship thingy that looks like a crystal or maybe some sort of mystical cactus. They then drop the kids off on a new planet, and the children run away over a paddock towards a tree. I assume this is The Tree of Knowledge or some shit. I almost expected the little girl to like, EAT AN APPLE or something else really SYMBOLIC.

It was so heavy-handed, I felt like I was being hit across the face with the Bible. But not in a religious way – in a stupid way. The writer of this movie seems to think that God was an alien. Or that angels are aliens. Or something.

At the very least, he seems to be having some deep thoughts, like: we think we know stuff, but actually, do we REALLY know stuff?? Are aliens real? Is there A God? Are they THE SAME THING? Also: We’re all gonna die someday.

Like, whoa.