Knowing (2009)
Summit Entertainment DVD
d. Alex Proyas; pr. Todd Black, Jason Blumenthal, Alex Proyas, Steve Tisch; scr. Ryne Douglas Pearson, Juliet Snowden, Stiles White; ph. Simon Duggan; ed. Richard Learoyd; m. Marco Beltrami; cast. Nicolas Cage, Chandler Canterbury, Rose Byrne, DG Maloney, Ben Mendelsohn (121 mins)
Knowing follows on from the 2008 sci-fi disaster Christmas release of The Day the Earth Stood Still. Both films share so much that in comparing them it seems that Hollywood’s idealists, propaganda-ists and aesthetes are conspiring over which direction the genre these two films comprise will take.
The review that follows is a comparison of these two films in order to set in context the inherent superiority of Knowing and its ambiguous complexity on issues which The Day the Earth Stood Still treated as moral truths in the greater functioning of the Universe. Both films use religious allegory in abundance but Knowing does so in a manner which stresses the allegory over the religion where The Day the Earth Stood Still did the reverse.
Both films are part of an unusual mini-genre, what might be termed “eschatological fantasy” after the Christian “science” (or more accurately “pseudo-science” as from a Rationalist perspective it is scientific as Alfred Jarry’s “pataphysics”) examining what happens on Judgement Day (which Christians consider inevitable).
Examples include The Seventh Sign and The Reaping: films in which (un-)natural disasters may be the result of Biblical judgment. Ironically, both of these films were directed by Australians (Carl Schultz and Stephen Hopkins respectively) as is Knowing. Indeed, Knowing’s director Alex Proyas is perhaps Australia’s most low-key Hollywood presence, working on Gothic fantasy (The Crow), philosophical science-fiction (Dark City) and blockbuster spectacular (I, Robot) whilst the more high-profile Baz Luhrmann went from Moulin Rouge to the over-hyped and under-performing Australia. But Proyas’ nationality is otherwise incidental to the film. Disaster and Biblical judgment featured heavily in the 2008 Day the Earth Stood Still but from a point of view which reverses the perspective in the original 1951 version by director Robert Wise.
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Where the original Robert Wise film was about the human race becoming too dangerous to other life forms in the universe due to its acquisition of nuclear power, the Scott Dickerson remake re-deploys this in support of a weakly-structured intelligent design allegory replete with overt Biblical reference. In the film’s appropriation of the disaster movie it seeks to relate natural disaster to intelligent design – in this case, the notion of Judgment Day. Wise cleverly appropriated the Christian myth to suit his political ends and used religious analogy as a construction exercise and not an appropriation of Christian belief but the remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still sought to reverse this and restore a belief in the validity of the self-sacrificial Christ myth to an America no living up to its responsibility to the universe’s intelligent designer(s).
The eschatological intelligent design fantasy of The Day the Earth Stood Still has now been held up to account by Knowing, which examines the enigma of chance vs. determinism in human conceptions of existence. It too is riddled with Biblical allusion – presences that Christian bloggers have already begun interpreting as angelic saviours of “the elect” – but differs from The Day the Earth Stood Still on two crucial points: 1) while there is evidence of pattern, foreknowledge and paranormal presence, this does not in itself constitute intelligent design, merely the ability to predict natural phenomena, and 2) there is no Christ analogy – no saviour here is ready to sacrifice himself to save humanity from disaster. Likewise, the disaster is construed differently in the two films – in The Day The Earth Stood Still it is imposed upon the planet by the aliens but in Knowing it is inevitable, set in motion perhaps when the universe was born.
Knowing emerges in turn as a questioning of scientific determinism as it intersects Biblical mythology in the form of the eschatological fantasy – the protocol of salvation at the so-called End of Days when Earth is at an end and humans stand judged. But that is where Knowing embraces philosophical aspects of unorthodox and even cultish Christian eschatology – there is no judgment: those to be “saved” here (so unlike Day the Earth Stood Still) have been pre-selected, chosen: in that it is closer to the ideals of Christian sects like the Jehovah’s Witnesses who believe only in limited numbers of pre-ordained people being “chosen” for salvation on Judgment Day.
In this, Knowing is a clever eschatological fantasy for rationalists. It carries the conviction of its Biblical allegories but relates this purely as mythic backdrop for the analysis of one man’s battle with personal psychological issues regarding foreknowledge in a deterministic universe. But, as mentioned at the outset to this review, the universe may indeed be deterministic but that in itself is no evidence of intelligent design. Thus, as eschatological fantasy Knowing simultaneously adopts the narrative pattern and divorces it from any validation of religious belief – Knowing is all metaphor and its absence of a religious message (so unlike Day the Earth Stood Still) in its take on a quintessentially religious sub-genre makes it one of the most rewarding sci-fi thrillers yet to emerge from 21st Century Hollywood.
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