Thread of Anticipating KNOWING with Nic Cage

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

Beau was the one that vomited light, obviously

this is the most xian fucking movie i've ever seen that doesn't have jesus as a character, yeesh

xpost, I mention four as in horsemen.

@ Elvis Telecom - Larry Niven's "Inconstant Moon" was adapted as an episode of Outer Limits, and its available in its entirety at YouTube. Michael Gross (of sitcom Family Ties) lives out his last night waiting for a solar flare sunrise. Not bad as an adaptation, though its let down by low budget effects at the end.

this movie was ridiculously entertaining

This movie cured me of my cold.
I thought the bunnies might be a Con-Air reference, but what do I know...

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.

― Tuomas, Wednesday, August 12, 2009 3:45 PM (1 month ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

this is my all-time favorite tuomas post, by a country mile

SPOILERS!!!!!!

I thought this film was great, like a '50's B-Movie with Biblical overtones. And Nic Cage wears the same blazer he wears in every other movie. Still didn't quite understand why the alien/angels saved such lame kids.

This movie provided an excellent example of Nic Cage's primary acting technique, namely YELLING HIS LINES AT OTHER CHARACTERS.

http://s2.buzzfeed.com/static/imagebuzz/terminal01/2009/9/25/9/andre-the-cage-8095-1253884320-2.jpg

Knowing director has a new film in development called Dracula Year Zero.

x-post HAHAHAHAHA YES! I saw this thread had been revived and said to myself pls pls let someone have posted the Andre/Nick pic. LOL.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3wle7aaKAF0

ok people watch the v end of this^ shit (whole thing is amazing but only the end is KNOWING)

Haha, they just swiped the whole scene from the movie!

haha yeah i remember that video came out like a week after i had rented Know1ng and had to like stop and rack my brain for a minute about where they jacked it from