Knowing (2009) Review: The Nicolas Cage Movie Roger Ebert Got Right

The Slept-On Cinema Case

Grobe's theory of the scores: "People want to know what type of movie they're watching, and this movie doesn't give you one type." The hosts read it as a peak-Cage-era film, "almost a genre of its own," that throws everything at you and keeps escalating until the last ten minutes. Neither host had seen it; Stan had confused it with Next, the other Cage-knows-the-future movie, which turns out not to qualify for the show.

The craft argument is the plane crash. Nominated for a visual effects award, the single-take sequence of a jet coming down beside the highway looked, per Grobe, "better than anything we've got" today, and it arrives after the movie teases you with a fender-bender first. The superflare finale gets the same treatment: they show you the end of the world instead of cutting away.

The first pick

Stan takes the concept of time capsules first overall (his lifelong regret is not burying one under his new garage). Grobe takes the plane crash. Later rounds: the telescope scene with Cage and his son, the classroom "thinking caps," the creaky Lexington professor's house, and, in the third round, Nicolas Cage himself, which Stan calls "the steal of the century."

The hosts also dig into the real thing: the oldest U.S. time capsule was buried by Sam Adams and Paul Revere in 1795, and there is a fifty-year capsule in Walpole, Massachusetts, near the film's Lexington setting, that the town has lost. Stan has a sharp shovel and is available.

BOLOs

• Numbers, cursive, whispering, and the sun.
• A solar-flare news report early on, a six-CD changer, and the terror threat level.
• Crew on the Charles (how else would you know it's Boston), a great flashlight, and an antler chandelier.
• A very bright mouth, a hearing aid, a flip clock, and an overpour to end all overpours.

Worth watching?

Yes, and go in knowing nothing. The hosts' one change is length: cut the family subplot with Cage's preacher father and land at a tight 95 to 100 minutes. Grobe's alternate ending has Cage getting on the ship. Superlative, favorite prediction: the mother who foretold her own daughter's death versus the way the film folds 9/11 into a Nic Cage plot eight years later. Bumper sticker: "We have to save the children," delivered frantically. Drink to pair: a 1975 bottle of wine, opened like a time capsule, or a whiskey overpoured into a glass that's too small.

Production observation

Opened number one in March 2009 with $24.6 million. Set in Lexington, Massachusetts, though not shot there. The film is referenced on Wikipedia's time capsule page, which the hosts consider a win. Spin-off pitches: Knowing: New Eden Games, in which the whisper people force the children of dead planets to compete and Nicolas Cage is the secret weapon, and a prequel about the alien boardroom that planned Earth.

Keep the movie night going

• Drive Angry for the Nicolas Cage movie the hosts did next.
• Snake Eyes for Cage in full command of a thriller.
• Movies Critics Got Wrong for more underdog picks.
• The Qualification List for every movie the show has defended.