Knowing (Proyas, USA, 2009)
I just posted this over at Imdb so I will share it here too:
Giving it a week or so after release in the UK to absorb the hype, I finally succumbed to my curiosity and went to see this film last night. Although the narrative promised something intriguing, quite unique and pushing the boundaries in terms of realistic violence that was shown (it is quite taboo to show burning victims of a plane crash and crushed commuters in a subway), the film was just cliché, boring and quite honestly laughable.
I wanted to mention a particular sequence within the film that I find problematic and want to accuse the Director and Writers of covering their own behind with this one scene to obscure any reservation the viewer may have with the narrative. I believe that this sequence is where we witness our protagonist John Koestler delivering a Lecture at the MIT concerning 'Fate' and 'Randomness' and later his friend mentioning Karl Jung's theory of synchronicity to further support this. I mention this because the film is littered with highly unlikely and impossible moments that if used in any other film it would be widely panned. For example, before John follows Diana (who is extremely annoying) to the museum, he looks up and just so happens to notice the second name on a road sign, or a mail box, I am unsure which, and matches it to the name on the envelope. Again, once he spills his cheap bourbon everywhere he places the glass down on sheet of paper filled with numbers and just so happens to pick 9/11/01 within the large area of which he placed the glass. How ironic he picks that date to begin with, seemingly to appease an audience who knows no other disaster than the attacks on New York in 2001.
Everything that happened that was down to chance, fate, randomness, synchronicity, any theory around this area in fact, is covered by THAT lecture sequence. I found myself critiquing every moment that was put down to fate and found myself frustrated that the lecture sequence was in the film, laughing at me, saying;
"look, the director and the writers.. *beeped* up, so we filmed this sequence to cover all the plot holes and coincidences"..
3/10