Love and hate and "Knowing" -- or, do wings have angels? | Roger Ebert

Posted by Reinaldo Massengill on Friday, March 22, 2024

I went looking at the various online roundups of critical opinion. Of course such averages mean little, but they give you a notion of how people are thinking. I usually don't peruse them, but this time I was fascinated. What was it about "Knowing" that made it so hated?

• On Metacritic, gets a 39 average. The reader vote is 8.1.

• On Rotten Tomatoes, the Meter stands at 24, and only 15% of the "Top Critics" liked it.

• On IMDb's user votes, the "median" was 9/10, but the "arithmetic mean" was 7.7/10. Of 397 votes, 191 were "10." IMDb goes with the mean.

• On MRQE, only one of 43 agrees with me.

Spoilers follow

This is astonishing. Let's suppose I was completely wrong. Even if I was how bad could the possibly movie be? Half as good as the slasher film "Shuttle?" A third as good as "The Last House on the Left?" (2009) If nothing else, it was a great popcorn movie: A time capsule contains perfect predictions of the following 50 years, a hero scientist races to avert disaster, two kids hear whispers in their ears, there are sensational special effects, mysterious figures loom in the woods, and at the end the kids are taken to another planet as Earth is incinerated. Plus a cerebral debate at MIT about whether the universe is deterministic or random.

Believe me, I know the plot is preposterous. That's part of the charm. You go to an end-of-the-world thriller starring Nicolas Cage looking scared to death, and you're in for a dime, in for a dollar. I love to dissect improbabilities in movies, but with "Knowing" I simply didn't care. I was carried by the energy. The premise, about that little girl in 1959 sealing up her letter, is preposterous. Every ad starts with that. What were you expecting, the Scientific American?

I wrote a blog discussing the movie [link below]. Right now it has nearly 250 comments. Most of my readers agreed with me. Some thought it stank. What interested me was how they discussed the movie. There seemed to be two big problems in some minds: Nicolas Cage, and the movie's Biblical parallels.

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