Thread of Anticipating KNOWING with Nic Cage

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I am so glad I watched this in the cinema

hallelujah!

should have been named Pebbles From Heaven

Well, that was all very... odd. Not much to add to what's already been said, other than that it seemed a little ill-advised for the angels/aliens to disguise themselves as members of the Gestapo if they want little kids to trust them.

Watched it last night and can't really muster up anything other than "what everybody else said." Agree with da croupier on what the title should have been.

I watched Angels & Demons right after it and concluded that both movies would have been improved greatly if cast & crew had simply switched projects (Nic Cage as intent Illuminati hunter directed by Proyas w/heaps of Catholic symbolism. Tom Hanks & Ron Howard discovering and facing the end of the world)

Was reminded of this short story (which would actually make a pretty good disaster movie)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inconstant_Moon

giant moose on fire & hitting the tree w/the baseball bat while shouting "u want some of this" were wicker man level

the plane crash was o_O

lolling @ cankles "also free complimentary bunnies w/ur apocalypse"

yeah wtf

also this movie feels like 4 hours long. on some jean eustache trip

LOL WTFF
how did this movie even happen
i wish it was about subway crashes because it could've used a few more of that scene and a few less of every other scene

YOU WANT SOMMA THIS?!
ahahaaaaaa

thought last scene wld be keyboard cat tbh

Hahah that would have been icing on the cake for sure.

I have no idea what was going on in this movie because I couldn't get past Cage's complete lack of sideburns.

Gotta watch out for those types.

It's different when not connected to long flowing hair!

thread should be moved to ilc imo

i mean I LOVE CRICKET: THE CHINATOWN OF ILX: THE CHINATOWN OF ILX

SPOILERS!!!

I thought this was pretty good! I mean, the whole story made absolutely no sense at all... If the aliens knew what was gonna happen 50 years ago, why did they come up with such a ridiculously complex plot to save a handful of kids (I take it there were two kids in all of those space ships in the end, even though the two main kids were all we saw) right before the end of the world? Why not just slowly ship folks away during those 50 years, so they could've saved more people? And why come upt with such silly way of passing the information instead of just, you know, telling the truth right from the beginning? But if you get past all the plot holes, the movie was quite entertaining to watch. I hadn't been spoiled about the plot, so it was genuinely cool to watch a movie were you really couldn't guess what's gonna happen next (no way did I see the movie ending with the destruction of the whole Earth). And Proyas is still great at coming up with arresting and scary cinema; those accident scenes were genuinely disturbing, and the finale looked absolutely gorgeous!

I think the Nick Cage is the best actor for these kind of films, because he can be totally earnest throughout the silliness. If the movie had had a nudge nudge wink wink, "you aren't really supposed to take this seriously" postmodern vibe, it would've just gone up its arse, and it would've been so much worse. You need to take it seriously for it to work, and Cage is perfect at portraying that seriousness. I mean, in the climax point of the movie the guy scrubbing paint away from an old cellar door to find out the cordinates scribbled to it by a school girl, which will lead him to the exact spot where space aliens will appear to rescue his son from the complete destruction of the Earth by the Sun, and when you write it down like this it's the stupidest thing you've ever heard, but when you're watching it on the screen you're there with him, and you totally believe in him, with all your heart, because he's Nick fucking Cage, and youre like, go Nick go! Scrub that paint! Scrub it!! Yeah!!

Because he's that good.

"go Nick go! Scrub that paint! Scrub it!! Yeah!!"
Nic can inspire this in Face/Off but not in this movie. He's pretty muted for a guy who is a) in that situation and b) Nicolas Cage.

Well yeah, he needs to be muted! He shouldn't go over the top, because it's a serious film and he needs to be serious. That's the point of it.

but somber Cage is like a bird with clipped wings -- let him fly, for god's sake!

I loved that not only did the story not really make any sense, but Cage even basically says "what was the point of me following all these clues if I couldn't do anything!?" And this is like a half hour before the end of the movie, and there's no real twist or anything from that point onward, just everything you pretty much have already been told is going to happen playing itself out.

I mean, you can say "newsflash: Hollywood is stupid," but it honestly amazes me how a movie that costs $50mil and went through years of development and rewrites could get on the screen without meeting even the most basic requirements for there to be any kind of logic to the progression of events or the protagonist's role in the story.

i just assumed it was a labor of love for nic and/or proyas (sure smelled like one) but wow yeah apparently this film had a lot of cooks.

I don't remember this too well, but were the clues for him? I thought they were for the kids, and it was just by mistake that he happened upon them, too. The story does kind of make sense if it turns out the aliens are not predicting the disasters, but actively facilitating them so they can steal their babies under cover of apocalypse, and if this is the case the movie missed out on a grand opportunity to have Cage punch out a guy in an alien costume.

shit if you're an alien angel the fuck do you need to blow up the world to steal a baby for

then again these guys did seem to enjoy taking the long way around ("let's just stare at 'em in leather jackets with our mouths open")

I guess you could interpret it that the schoolgirl 50 years ago got all the information accidentally, being mentally attuned with the aliens like her granddaughter was, and that she or Nick Cage were never meant to have any use for those clues. It looked like the aliens were gonna grab the kids they'd chosen anyway, so all the clues did was to make Cage find out what was going on. It still doesn't make sense why or how the aliens would've predicted all those other accidents, and why this information was what the schoolgirl got from them, even if it was an accident.

Yeah, even if Cage is just the guy whose son is the 'chosen one' and he happens to figure out the clues (which were utterly useless to him or anyone else and were figured out at the last possible minute) -- nothing that happens with him or the kids actually facilitates the aliens being able to take the kids into space. Cage was leaving the boy alone to walk up to the aliens' car, wander to them in the forest, etc. the whole damn movie, it's not like he had to be tricked into delivering him into their hands!

Another favorite moment -- Cage picks the "91101" sequence of apparently at random out of the middle of the long string of numbers, AND THEN thinks oh hey September 11th 2001!

btw you can maximize your fun while watching this movie if you assign names to the aryan aliens -- i decided very early on to call them Franklin & Beauregard

I mean, the aliens already knew what was gonna happen 50 years in the future, and they probably already had an intricate plan to save humanity back then, so the schoolgirl just accidentally caught a glimpse of that plan. The aliens never intended her or Nick Cage to find out.

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Beauregard sounds like a name for an alien that needs punchin' ha!

They didn't predict the disasters, they made them happen, probably as a training exercise for the big one at the end.
The sensitivity to the numbers means these are humans who are compatible with alien DNA or something. This is just a snippet of
alien radio they are able to pickup -- the kids get other messages, too, it's just that the movie is focused on this security leak.

"They didn't predict the disasters, they made them happen"

you making that up!

Yeah, there's nothing in the movie to suggest they caused any of the accidents, they simply seemed to have an incredibly accurate way of predicting the future.

Yeah but but but all of these very specific dominos fell into place just for him -- a guy who actually wrote a paper about solar flares! -- to figure this stuff out. So either the movie is saying the universe is very deterministic and set all this stuff up, or the universe is so random that it set up this incredibly unlikely sequence of events that just happened to really screw with this one professor's head and make him think there was a big plan for the universe and not just some aliens that can see the future?

It seems many of you thought the movie had some sort of Christian message because of the aliens' somewhat angelic apperance and because of the final scene, but I though it was the other way around: I interpreted it that the aliens had visited Earth before in ancient times, but back the people didn't know what to think of them, so they thought the aliens were angels (or gods or whatever), and remnants of their apperance had been kept alive in myths. So it's like in Erich von Däniken's "ancient astronauts" theory. Maybe the aliens had even tried to inform the ancient people about the coming destruction, but those people didn't quite get it, so they turned the predictions into various myths about the end of the world/apocalypse.

but it fits so perfectly! the numbers are just timestamps of covert ops.

it's an oblique hint, but it's there in the movie.

I don't think the theme or message was Christian or spiritual at all, really, but the ending had a Noah's ark theme and the main character reconciling with his father who's a reverend, so I can't say people talking about that angle are just making it up.

The only direct reference to religion is Nick Cage's final comment, when he says knows there's something after death, but even that line could interpreted in many ways, not necessarily in a Christian way. Maybe he just meant he knows his genes (and humanity in general) will go on after the Earth's death, because his kid had just been taken by the aliens.

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Yeah, I know the Christian stuff was put there quite intentionally, but there's nothing to suggest an explicit Christian interpretation of the story. If the aliens really were angels, why didn't God show up at any point?

yeah the christian themes are crucial to interpreting the predictions as de facto intentions in the sense that an omniscient god implies an omnipotent god -- His "KNOW1NG" is equivalent to making those things happen. Hence, the aliens made those things happen.

It was pretty creepy when the boy and girl were shown frolicking through the fields. i was expecting pedo-bear to pop up.

They didn't make them happen, but there's no way they (or Nick Cage) could've stopped them from happening, because they'd already "known" about them 50 years before. The movie has very deterministic flavour.

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'there's no way they (or Nick Cage) could've stopped them from happening, because they'd already "known" about them 50 years before.'

recast this idea in the form of christian apologia -- God knows about future suffering and apocalypse, yet why doesn't he stop it? SO IT IS WRITTEN, SO IT SHALL BE! In this way, God escapes culpability.

and in the end, the same excuse works on Cage. The aliens could have easily taken him along to planet skittles, but they're all, "no sorry, not in the script, old chap" and Cage pretty limply takes it and goes home to mope with his preacher dad, goin "aw shucks, i guess you were right after all, it's not God's fault when bad things happen, just like it's not these angelians fault they wouldn't let me hitch a ride on their spacemobile, and I was angry all this time for nuthin."

There were four aliens...

yeah but there were a few scenes where there just 1 or 2 were present -- those were Frank & Beau, the others weren't deemed worthy of naming