It’s the end of the world as we know it…

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No, nothing to do with the song, but with a movie I saw with my daughters this weekend.

I saw Knowing on Friday evening. Decent enough movie, but it was not one I would have picked just to see a movie. We picked this one, because I was too tired to drive to another town to see the movie we really wanted to see. It was the best of the three in our local theater.

If anyone can remember my scale of movies… This one was a wait for a rental. A fairly predictable movie, and it had moments of a couple of other Nicholas Cage movies. Yes, the character and surrounding story was a lot like the National Treasure movies. The plot driving it could be taken out of any ‘end of the world’ movie.

Two things I noticed in the movie were that Cages character was a widower (that kind of stands out to me) and he drank way too much. I mean if any ‘normal’ person was drinking as much as his character did, I wouldn’t have trusted them to know much of anything about what he was doing. He had at least 3 good glasses of whiskey before he started to work on the numbers project. I would have been too messed up to even see the numbers….

On the widower point, I think that was handled fairly well. Some widows/ers do turn to booze to help them cope with loss. They can be overprotective of their children. They will turn down chances to meet someone else. They will wear their wedding rings long after the death of their spouse. Even without the booze, they will forget the days they are running the car pool. And the children will see all of this. Yes, this part of the story was handled well. No fake romance thrown in. The caring seen between the two adults in the situation, was because of the situation, not because of romance. Well done.

I just wish this much care had been taken in the story/plot/characters. It had moments that could have made it a much better movie, but ‘things’ got in the way. As stated above this could just as easily have been a “National Treasure end of the world” story. That for me made the movie a bit less interesting. I didn’t think Cage was that one dimensional, but maybe I’m wrong.

11 thoughts on “It’s the end of the world as we know it…”

  1. Argh. I hate it when I do that double capital letter typo- seems to happen all too often. So did pressing the caps lock key until I disabled it.

  2. I stopped reading when I saw what movie you were talking about. I thought the previews for this one looked good, so I’ve been wanting to see it and probably will tomorrow and then I can read the rest of your post and comments.

  3. Dang, nobody thinks I can write a review and not give away the ending of a movie. 🙁 Ok, reading it again, I can see where I give too much away.

  4. Not as good as I thought it’d be; I had been looking forward to this one. Cheesy ending.
    About the drinking, I think the point was to emphasize that the character turned to alcohol to help him cope with the loss of his spouse, and by the end, he had cut back.
    This movie illustrated your last point, something I had long suspected: Nicholas Cage IS a one dimensional actor.

  5. Ok, looking back at all the Nicholas Cage movies I’ve seen, he is one dimensional. Same character, every movie, it is just that the movies were different enough to miss it. Same character, different situation it is hidden from me. Same character, same situation, the lack of character change is very noticeable.

    Good movie, that I liked him in had the same character… The Rock.

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