***FYI, mild spoilers in here because it was the only way I could talk about this film. Don't read if you don't want to know. I don't give away everything, but a few tidbits of info.***
Yesterday afternoon, I topped off my spring break with one more jaunt to the theater. This time it was to see last weekend's box office hit Knowing, which stars Nicolas Cage. Now, if you read this blog or know me in any capacity, you'll know that I have a hard time saying that I didn't like something. Usually, I find enough nuggets of goodness (parts that I liked) to more or less enjoy a film (or book or experience... etc.). Not so with this film. I'm not going to say I hated it - because that isn't strictly true. But I wasn't a huge fan.
Let me start by saying what I did like so I don't just rip it apart all at once. First of all, I really do adore Nicolas Cage. He can do no wrong in my eyes. His presence on the screen made the film more or less workable. Second, I applaud the writers for the basic premise of the film - the idea of a sheet filled with numbers coming out of a time capsule, and having these numbers spell out all the natural disasters, etc etc... That is cool. Also, I like some of the ideas presented in the film. The presentation of science versus religion, determinism versus randomness, of the inevitability of our planet's destruction... those are a good set of ideas to build a film around. Particularly the last one. We're so worried about mutual destruction through nuclear power, about global warming, starvation, and wars (all things we could more or less try to change) that we don't realize that a simple burst of energy from our sun - a bit of radiation - could wipe us out before you can say "uh oh." All I'm saying is that if the end is going to come - in that big cataclysmic sense - we're probably not going to be able to do much about it.
Okay, now onto what didn't quite work. My main problem with this movie is that it had no genre. I expected it to be in the sci fi action adventure realm - and those elements are there... but there's also the haunted house angle, coupled with an undertone of child-devil or the exorcist, mixed in with a religious allegory, layered right on top of a Close Encounters-esque alien invasion story line. What the hell kind of audience is this film going to appeal to? It's too scary for the soft-weight, nerdy, sci fi types... too outlandish for the hardcore horror fans... and there's too much fiction for the intellectual scientific types. No matter who sees this film, it seems to me that there is going to be an element that just doesn't quite fit.
Next: there was no character development, relationships, or emotional attachments for the audience to latch onto, for the story to be more real. The relationship between Cage's character and his son Caleb was painful to watch - laden down with horrible cliche lines like "Don't make me ask you twice, Caleb!" and "Do your homework, no TV tonight." Additionally, Cage's character was supposed to be a hurting widower, slowly becoming a drunk - but even though he was downing massive amount of whiskey, it really only resulted in a few extra naps. The characters were all the epitome of flat and static. Backstory came in little bursts, but nothing ever truly came of it. Last but not least, there was no romance between Cage and his female counterpart Rose Byrne. I'm not saying that every good film has to have a romance - but this movie could have used one to lighten it up, make it more poignant.
Let me just take a moment to go back to one of the things I've already said: I liked the premise of the story. This wasn't even a case of "good idea, bad execution" (like the so-so film Vantage Point, for example)... I just would have taken this good idea in a completely different direction, and I probably wouldn't have taken it in the end-of-the-world direction at all. Allow my imagination to run free for a moment...If this had been a film I was making, here's what I would have done. Keep the beginning the same all the way through when Nicolas Cage gets the sheet of numbers. Keep the woman who wrote the numbers alive and bring her back into the story somehow - not quite sure what I'd do there yet. Anyway, Cage's character figures out what the numbers mean - matches them up with history... but instead of seeing only 3 future dates, there are more. Maybe 10. He and his buddies at MIT start working with the numbers after the plane crash - when they start to believe him. They finally figure out a formula that makes sense - that generates the future numbers, etc. They start looking at the components of the formula, and maybe find that the time and scale of these disasters are directly proportional to negativity poured into the universe - people killed, corruption, human destruction, etc. Something to do with a natural balance of positive and negative energy. Kind of like positive and dark matter. Conservation of Energy or something like that. They figure out that there's a way to balance these things out, and though they're not able to stop all the bad things from happening, they lessen them. Nice happy ending where father realizes that the negative feelings over his wife's death has been hurting his son and he has to make up for it. Voila! Feel good film.
This is getting quite long so I'll be sure to wrap it up now. I want to stress that I didn't hate the film - it just wasn't quite "for me." Nicolas Cage was fun to watch for 2 hours and the CGI (particularly at the end) was kind of cool. It was an interesting mix of ideas and elements, and a good end-of-the-world film. You'd have to watch it to know your own opinion - others I've spoken with liked it, while some hated it. As a complex film, it's going to be very dependent on the person seeing it. But, hey, you can't have an ace in the hole with every film you see, right?
Yesterday afternoon, I topped off my spring break with one more jaunt to the theater. This time it was to see last weekend's box office hit Knowing, which stars Nicolas Cage. Now, if you read this blog or know me in any capacity, you'll know that I have a hard time saying that I didn't like something. Usually, I find enough nuggets of goodness (parts that I liked) to more or less enjoy a film (or book or experience... etc.). Not so with this film. I'm not going to say I hated it - because that isn't strictly true. But I wasn't a huge fan.Let me start by saying what I did like so I don't just rip it apart all at once. First of all, I really do adore Nicolas Cage. He can do no wrong in my eyes. His presence on the screen made the film more or less workable. Second, I applaud the writers for the basic premise of the film - the idea of a sheet filled with numbers coming out of a time capsule, and having these numbers spell out all the natural disasters, etc etc... That is cool. Also, I like some of the ideas presented in the film. The presentation of science versus religion, determinism versus randomness, of the inevitability of our planet's destruction... those are a good set of ideas to build a film around. Particularly the last one. We're so worried about mutual destruction through nuclear power, about global warming, starvation, and wars (all things we could more or less try to change) that we don't realize that a simple burst of energy from our sun - a bit of radiation - could wipe us out before you can say "uh oh." All I'm saying is that if the end is going to come - in that big cataclysmic sense - we're probably not going to be able to do much about it.
Okay, now onto what didn't quite work. My main problem with this movie is that it had no genre. I expected it to be in the sci fi action adventure realm - and those elements are there... but there's also the haunted house angle, coupled with an undertone of child-devil or the exorcist, mixed in with a religious allegory, layered right on top of a Close Encounters-esque alien invasion story line. What the hell kind of audience is this film going to appeal to? It's too scary for the soft-weight, nerdy, sci fi types... too outlandish for the hardcore horror fans... and there's too much fiction for the intellectual scientific types. No matter who sees this film, it seems to me that there is going to be an element that just doesn't quite fit.
Next: there was no character development, relationships, or emotional attachments for the audience to latch onto, for the story to be more real. The relationship between Cage's character and his son Caleb was painful to watch - laden down with horrible cliche lines like "Don't make me ask you twice, Caleb!" and "Do your homework, no TV tonight." Additionally, Cage's character was supposed to be a hurting widower, slowly becoming a drunk - but even though he was downing massive amount of whiskey, it really only resulted in a few extra naps. The characters were all the epitome of flat and static. Backstory came in little bursts, but nothing ever truly came of it. Last but not least, there was no romance between Cage and his female counterpart Rose Byrne. I'm not saying that every good film has to have a romance - but this movie could have used one to lighten it up, make it more poignant.
Let me just take a moment to go back to one of the things I've already said: I liked the premise of the story. This wasn't even a case of "good idea, bad execution" (like the so-so film Vantage Point, for example)... I just would have taken this good idea in a completely different direction, and I probably wouldn't have taken it in the end-of-the-world direction at all. Allow my imagination to run free for a moment...If this had been a film I was making, here's what I would have done. Keep the beginning the same all the way through when Nicolas Cage gets the sheet of numbers. Keep the woman who wrote the numbers alive and bring her back into the story somehow - not quite sure what I'd do there yet. Anyway, Cage's character figures out what the numbers mean - matches them up with history... but instead of seeing only 3 future dates, there are more. Maybe 10. He and his buddies at MIT start working with the numbers after the plane crash - when they start to believe him. They finally figure out a formula that makes sense - that generates the future numbers, etc. They start looking at the components of the formula, and maybe find that the time and scale of these disasters are directly proportional to negativity poured into the universe - people killed, corruption, human destruction, etc. Something to do with a natural balance of positive and negative energy. Kind of like positive and dark matter. Conservation of Energy or something like that. They figure out that there's a way to balance these things out, and though they're not able to stop all the bad things from happening, they lessen them. Nice happy ending where father realizes that the negative feelings over his wife's death has been hurting his son and he has to make up for it. Voila! Feel good film.
This is getting quite long so I'll be sure to wrap it up now. I want to stress that I didn't hate the film - it just wasn't quite "for me." Nicolas Cage was fun to watch for 2 hours and the CGI (particularly at the end) was kind of cool. It was an interesting mix of ideas and elements, and a good end-of-the-world film. You'd have to watch it to know your own opinion - others I've spoken with liked it, while some hated it. As a complex film, it's going to be very dependent on the person seeing it. But, hey, you can't have an ace in the hole with every film you see, right?
1 comment:
I too really like Nicolas Cage but I am not of the can watch him read the phone book and will love it mind set like I am with say Gary Oldman or Alan Rickman. The previews for this had me thinking it was in line with the National Treasure type so I thought I might want to see it. Now I think maybe not so much. I might check it out when it hits netflix or cable but it doesn't sound like what I thought it would be and not really my cup of tea. Thanks for the review :)
Post a Comment