Starting in 2020, I decided to watch & review the entire Nicolas Cage filmography in alphabetical order. This is 𝔗𝔥𝔢 𝔜𝔢𝔞𝔯 𝔬𝔣 ℭ𝔞𝔤𝔢 – Chapter 41.

See my video “Fan Edit of 2009's Knowing: The Point of KNOWING is KNOWING (you know??)” below.

I don’t KNOW what to say/write about KNOW1NG (2009) (there’s a “1” in the stylization of the title because: numbers!). It is a B-Movie dressed up as a big budget CGI sci-fi thing starring Cage. And said ‘09 CGI era FX don’t exactly hold up, though I still appreciate them for what they are. It’s not so comically bad that it is, in fact, good, but god almighty it gets close enough to hitting those notes more often than not.

So what I’d like to do in this space, instead, is point to the head-scratching perfect 4-out-of-4 star Roger Ebert review (he named it his 6th best movie of the year!). “Knowing is among the best science-fiction films I've seen -- frightening, suspenseful, intelligent and, when it needs to be, rather awesome,” he writes. “The plot involves the most fundamental of all philosophical debates: Is the universe deterministic or random?” he continues.

I would like to KNOW what exactly the E-Man was smoking back in 2009! Because this take is INSANE. The movie isn’t asking that question! The film is about aliens (“the whisper people” LOL) who definitively, without a doubt KNOW those answers (the only one in particular that matters being earth’s expiration date) and — ostensibly functioning as god-like entities — decide that Cage’s son and Rose Bryne’s daughter (and also two white rabbits LOLLL) need to be “saved” to continue the human race on an idyllic planet in another galaxy far far away. That isn’t philosophy; it’s dime-store sci-fi. Which is fine! But how the preeminent critic of a generation could swing and miss this badly is fascinating. This is simply a platform for three or four CGI-laden set-pieces that take about ten minutes of the film’s 2-hour run-time. The “plot” is inane filler.  

“The logic of the story leads us to expect something really spectacular at the end, and I was not disappointed visually, although I have logical questions that are sort of beside the point,” Ebert concludes. And what he obviously doesn’t KNOW is that “missing the point/not seeing that there is no point” and something being “besides the point” are VERY different things.

Still, we can’t ignore the aforementioned and very prominent LOL-factor. So…

THE VERDICT: 6 CAGES OUT OF 10

CLICK HERE for all 𝔗𝔥𝔢 𝔜𝔢𝔞𝔯 𝔬𝔣 ℭ𝔞𝔤𝔢 Chapters + Ongoing Rankings.