Directrospective: KNOWING (2009)
Notes on the films of Australian director Alex Proyas.
Caleb Koestler (Chandler Canterbury) has a vision of the Earth’s fiery demise.
Alex Proyas has a thing about the Sun. He’s from Australia, so I’m not all that surprised, but many of his films revolve around (sorry) that big fiery fella we all know and love, in a very direct way. SPIRITS OF THE AIR, GREMLINS OF THE CLOUDS plays out in dusty old shack in the middle of a sun-scorched wasteland with the tired old boards barely holding out the harsh light. THE CROW and DARK CITY are both defined by their sunlessness, the latter very literally so, and John Murdock’s climactic overthrow of the world-dominating Strangers is symbolized by his reorienting the entire world toward the Sun. GARAGE DAYS, which is Proyas’s only film besides KNOWING to take place in some form of the real world and is also dogshit and don’t watch it, is bathed in a warm Sydney sunlight that made me really feel for Australian goths and punks like that film’s Tanya and Lucy, and presumably Proyas himself, suffering in heavy black get-ups they hope will convey an inner darkness that’s hard to see with all that glare coming off the ocean. It’s just not a particularly depression-friendly climate. There’s a reason grunge came from Seattle and black metal from Norway.
Maybe it’s fitting, then, that Proyas’s 2009 film KNOWING ends with the Earth being consumed by a raging wave of solar radiation that burns to death every living thing on the planet. Dude hates the fucking Sun. Writing this in the early days of a historic heat wave here in Los Angeles, I can certainly relate. Motherfucker’s brutal. The Sun is the perfect Proyas antagonist, if you think about it - ever-present, warm and friendly on its face while flings you around in its inescapable grip, just biding its time until it swallows the whole world up in its voracious need to consume. The strains of paranoia and persecution that run through his work reach a crescendo here, but there’s a bleakness that’s new.
It’s a Cassandra story: in the late 1950s, a Boston elementary school student named Lucinda Embry (Lara Robinson with some eyebrow work that makes her look just like Rose Byrne, really spooky stuff) gets real weird and stares directly into the Sun. When it’s time to write letters to bury in the school’s time capsule, she scribbles down a big long string of numbers like a lunatic and then bloodies her fingernails carving more numbers into a door. Fifty years later, the time capsule is dug up and Lucinda’s letter ends up in the hands of nine-year-old Caleb Koestler (Chandler Canterbury), the haunted son of haunted MIT space professor John Koestler (Nicolas Cage). Cage is at an interesting point here physically: he already has the weird hair that looks like it belongs to someone right behind him, but he’s still got a jarringly sculpted movie star physique. Just something I noticed. Anyway, Koestler is a science genius whose wife died so he stares at the spooky little girl’s spooky string of numbers until he realizes that it predicted 9/11, from which he learns how to decode the rest of the letter, which predicted the dates of a bunch of large-scale losses of human life since 1959 along with rough geographic coordinates and death tolls. But some of them haven’t happened quite yet! And the last one just says 33 people are going to die, which is sad but doesn’t seem like that many, relatively speaking! Weird that that’s the end of the list, huh? I’m sure none of this has anything to do with the creepy blonde men in the old car whom he may or may not be seeing everywhere.
One of the events Lucinda predicted was the hotel fire in which Koestler’s wife died, and while he’s still trying to figure out if he’s completely insane, a plane crashes into a field right next to him the moment he realizes he’s sitting in traffic at the exact coordinates listed for the next event. A pretty impressive and unsettling single-take scene of Cage trying to pull people from burning plane wreckage follows, and he and we are now very convinced that Lucinda’s code is the real deal.
Of course everyone else thinks he’s insane, especially since he’s become a real nothing-happens-for-a-reason guy since his wife died (before this I guess he was one of those God’s Plan astrophysicists we’re all familiar with) and now claims to have uncovered a prophecy of mass casualties to come. In his quest to understand what he’s found, he tracks down Lucinda’s grown daughter, Diana (Rose Byrne), who now has a daughter of her own named Abby (Lara Robinson again). Abby and Caleb hit it off but Diana is understandably terrified of the man who claims he’s found her late mentally ill mother’s doomsday prediction and not only believes it’s true but that it has something to do with him in particular. Caleb’s started to have lunatic visions just like Lucinda did, which does little to put her at ease. I guess it’s hard for Abby to make friends, though, because Diana starts to come around and together they figure out that the last catastrophe on the list isn’t going to kill 33 people…it’s going to kill EE people backwards. EE for “Everyone Else.” Everyone is going to die.
There’s a pretty goddamned devastating movie to be made about an astrophysicist who knows exactly when and how the world is going to end but can’t do anything about it. Cassandra is such a tragic figure that there’s a whole Cassandra complex about her. But Proyas isn’t particularly interested in making that movie. He plays around with this a little bit - Koestler tells his friend Ben Mendelsohn to go home and be with his wife in their last hours on Earth and he lies to Diana and his parents that they’ll be safe underground so that they can at least die feeling less helpless - but here’s where the movie shifts to some classic Alex Proyas privileged liberation shit. It turns out, you see, that the creepy blonde men are aliens of the Nordic alien variety, who despite their 1978 INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS-meets-THE WORLD’S END shriek-and-throat-light-beam combo attack are actually benevolent telepathic beings (by the way I am extremely comfortable with decades of UFO literature describing the nice, helpful type of aliens as tall, blonde, beautiful Nazi-style Aryans, that sounds great to me, no notes). They’ve been speaking to spooky children all over the world through, like, messages from the Sun or something, subliminally instructing them to be at certain places in the hours before the apocalypse so that the Nordic aliens can take them in space arks to a new planet where they will restart humanity. It has to be kids for some reason that I can’t remember. The spaceship seems pretty big so it’s not that. But Caleb and Abby are launched into space. Then everybody in the world is burnt alive by some gnarly CGI and it’s pretty intense, frankly. Gotta admire the chutzpah to end the world like that. Not that Proyas strikes me as someone who’s particularly squeamish, it’s just that movies about existential threats usually end with the world getting saved at the last minute. No such luck here! Except for those kids, they get to live on a new planet that looks like the future part of THE FOUNTAIN and also the dream zone where the Black Panther talks to his dead father in BLACK PANTHER. I’m sure it’s nice.
Having some Nordic dudes decide which children are most genetically beneficial to the human race is, obviously, very icky, and while there’s a big zoom-out shot of arks lifting off from all over the Earth, even the parts that have fewer little white children, this is still the kind of revelation and liberation for those who deserve it that DARK CITY trades in. All of the mythology is saved till the very last moment to maximize the twist’s effect, so they don’t even get into this, but if the blonde men knew this was going to happen as early as 1959 they could have started evacuating people earlier. One could argue that it takes a while to build a bunch of spaceships and get them to Earth, but from what I can tell Abby and Caleb have the ark to themselves and they’re still kids when they land at Black Panther’s dead dad’s house, so clearly these guys have tons of ships and they go really fast. Proyas didn’t write this movie, and it bounced around Hollywood for a while with various other filmmakers attached before he landed on it, but this sort of thing is right in his wheelhouse. There just simply isn’t room for everyone on the ark! It’s too bad that it has to work out that way, but that’s how it goes, son. I’m not terribly concerned about whether humanity continues as a species; I’m not terribly invested in the team for the team’s sake. Not that I don’t care if other people live or die, far from it. I just take little comfort in some Gifted and Talented youngsters getting shipped off to Eden Camp where they’ll bum around for another ten years until they’re sexually mature and then I guess make charts of who bones down whom to maximize genetic diversity in the new world. Everybody died! I’m dead! You’re dead! We have to fix the world for the people who are here right now! This sucks, Alex!
(To clear something up that was unclear to me: this is not the movie where Nicolas Cage has a premonition of Jessica Biel strapped to a wheelchair that explodes. That’s the other late-2000s Nicolas Cage Knows About Bad Stuff Before It Happens movie, NEXT, which I also watched in the hope that it would be useful for this piece. It was not.)