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DVDfever.co.uk – Knowing Blu-ray review Dom Robinson reviews
E1 Entertainment Blu-ray: 
DVD:
- Cert:
- Running time: 121 minutes
- Cat no: SUM51235R0
- Year: 2009
- Pressing: August 2009
- Region(s): 2, PAL
- Chapters: 16 plus extras (36 on DVD)
- Sound: Dolby Digital 5.1
- Languages: English
- Subtitles: English for hearing impaired
- Widescreen: 2.35:1
- 16:9-Enhanced: Yes
- Macrovision: Yes
- Disc Format: BD50
- Price: £24.99 (Blu-ray); £19.99 (DVD)
- Extras: Knowing All: The Making of a Futuristic Thriller, Visions of the apocalypse, Theatrical trailer, TV Spots, Director’s Commentary
- Vote and comment on this film: View Comments
Director:
- Alex Proyas
(The Crow, Dark City, Garage Days, I Robot, Knowing)
Producers:
- Jason Blumenthal, Alex Proyas and Steve Tisch
Screenplay:
- Ryne Douglas Pearson, Juliet Snowden and Stiles White
Original Score :
- Marco Beltrami
Cast :
- John Koestler: Nicolas Cage
Caleb Koestler: Chandler Canterbury
Diana: Rose Byrne
Abby/Lucinda: Lara Robinson
The Stranger: D.G. Moloney
Grace: Nadia Townsend
Reverend Koestler: Alan Hopgood
Allison: Adrienne Pickering
As Knowing begins, a weird girl scribbles down a load of numbers as her entry to a time capsule to be placed in front her school in the autumn of 1959. The plan is to bury it underground and dig it up only in 50 years time so the kids of the future can see what sort of things their predecessors came up with. Let’s just hope that it’s not covered in rain and is rotted away from insufficient storage, rather like the 25-year time capsule from Blue Peter…
Fast-forward fifty years and we see Nicolas Cage is Professor John Koestler, an astrophysics lecturer to a bunch of overly smart kids. He hasn’t got an easy life for himself, despite the massive house and big plot of land. For a start he’s fallen out with his Dad, many years before, but also his wife is dead and his son has hearing problems.
He believes that everything has a purpose, an order to it. It is determined. But what about the chance of a randomness factor coming into the equation? Surely that can’t happen… or can it? This will make sense later on.
In the meantime, when the time capsule is opened and each child at Caleb’s school gets an envelope. While most of them got a picture, he gets the one with numbers written on it.
Cage starts trying to fathom out what they mean and at first thinks it’s a coincidence when he separates some of them to tie-in with the number of lives lost on Sept 11th 2001, but then he checks out many more…. and yes, the girl has basically determined the number of deaths within the next 50 years in tragedies. It also includes some that haven’t happened yet… Ooh, blimey!
Meanwhile, Caleb is getting some whistling in his earpiece and this is caused by voices whispering all around him, but what can they mean?
Knowing is not your average run-of-the-mill Nicolas Cage movie, which is helped by the fact it was directed by Alex Proyas, even though I never really enjoyed the two films I’ve previously seen of his – The Crow and Dark City, as I can at least get an idea of what he’s trying to depict and despite the nonsense of the premise it does end up as a very intriguing film. There’s also reasonable support from Rose Byrne as Diana, a woman he meets by chance in a museum, but did they really meet by chance or is there a necessary connection here? Oh, what do you think 🙂
I previously took a look at the DVD and, like that format, the film is presented in 2.35:1 anamorphic widescreen and both picture and sound are without fault. The image is sharp and colourful, bringing across the mystery of the situation as well as nicely detailing the occasional CGI scenes just as they should be. For the record I’m watching on a 37″ Panasonic plasma screen via a Samsung BD-P1400 Blu-Ray Player. The sound comes in DTS 5.1 and everything mentioned within the picture comes across without a hitch and the explosions pack a punch when required.
The extras are as follows on both DVD and Blu-ray:
- Knowing All: The Making of a Futuristic Thriller (12:35): All the key cast and crew members have their say amongst clips of the film about what’s at the heart of the film. I’m aware that sounds vague, but if I was to go into detail then it would spoil the film.
- Visions of the apocalypse (17:13): A segment about those who fear the end of the world before its time.
- Theatrical trailer (1:22): Presented in 16:9, although the two previous segments had film clips in 2.35:1.
- TV Spots: Six of them, ranging between 10-30 seconds in length, usually repeating most of the same footage, although they feature an angle on that plane which doesn’t actually make it into the finished film.
- Director’s Commentary: with Alex Proyas.
The main menu blends a brief segment of the theme with some motion clips from the film, which is better than the DVD which was a fairly dull affair – static and with some of the not-very-emphatic theme music. There are subtitles in English and while the DVD version had a decent number of chapters with 36 across the two hours – and Contender used to stick rigidly to 12 per release, however long the film – the Blu-ray version opts for a mere 16! Why the vast difference between the two formats? Hopefully under their new brand, as E1, this is one important matter that’s being addressed for future films, as well as the subtitles which were lacking on many earlier Contender releases.
PICTURE QUALITY
SOUND QUALITY
EXTRAS
OVERALL 
Reviewer of movies, videogames and music since 1994. Aortic valve operation survivor from the same year. Running DVDfever.co.uk since 2000. Nobel Peace Prize winner 2021.