Knowing Me, Knowing You
My favorite response to the 2009 movie Knowing came from an anonymous movie-goer here in Dallas who said, "Jesus, please don't send your crazy alien angels to save us."
Personally, I must admit that I liked this story better when it was titled "The Boy Who Predicted Earthquakes".
As for the religious angle, I'm surprised that a certain film critic of Scandinavian descent didn't even try to equate the "Adam and Eve" figures at the end with the Norse entities Lif and Lifthrasir. Come to think of it, those pagans used to come up with a lot of nasty theories about how the world would end with little if any input from the Left Behind set. But I am sure that was just a coincidence.
For that matter, I could not help viewing the ending of this movie without thinking of the old Neil Young song "After the Gold Rush". Which probably was not the screenwriters' intention...
In any event, there had been at least one effort on the Internet to compare this movie by director Alex Proyas to a famous science fiction short story written by Robert Heinlein which was called "The Year of the Jackpot". The short story in question had no angels, no children, and took place near Los Angeles around the year 1952. However, like the movie, it had a mathematically talented man who stumbled upon a statistical way to see bad things coming, a correlation with ancient prophecy, a young twentysomething woman who was caught up by events, a road trip that was made against incredible odds, and a last-day revelation that the sun is about to explode... Of course, I had actually read that same short story as a teenager and I still did not make the connection. Perhaps because Heinlein and Proyas had such different attitudes towards their material. Heinlein treated the whole end of the world thing as some sort of surprise ending while Proyas dwelt on it and dwelt on it. Plus there was a certain matter-of-fact tone to Heinlein's story that Knowing could have used in place of its more melodramatic attitude. And considering the fact that Heinlein's short story essentially argued that a large group of women removing their clothes in public was a sign of impending doom, that's saying something.
However, to each his own.
My favorite response to the 2009 movie Knowing came from an anonymous movie-goer here in Dallas who said, "Jesus, please don't send your crazy alien angels to save us."
Personally, I must admit that I liked this story better when it was titled "The Boy Who Predicted Earthquakes".
As for the religious angle, I'm surprised that a certain film critic of Scandinavian descent didn't even try to equate the "Adam and Eve" figures at the end with the Norse entities Lif and Lifthrasir. Come to think of it, those pagans used to come up with a lot of nasty theories about how the world would end with little if any input from the Left Behind set. But I am sure that was just a coincidence.
For that matter, I could not help viewing the ending of this movie without thinking of the old Neil Young song "After the Gold Rush". Which probably was not the screenwriters' intention...
In any event, there had been at least one effort on the Internet to compare this movie by director Alex Proyas to a famous science fiction short story written by Robert Heinlein which was called "The Year of the Jackpot". The short story in question had no angels, no children, and took place near Los Angeles around the year 1952. However, like the movie, it had a mathematically talented man who stumbled upon a statistical way to see bad things coming, a correlation with ancient prophecy, a young twentysomething woman who was caught up by events, a road trip that was made against incredible odds, and a last-day revelation that the sun is about to explode... Of course, I had actually read that same short story as a teenager and I still did not make the connection. Perhaps because Heinlein and Proyas had such different attitudes towards their material. Heinlein treated the whole end of the world thing as some sort of surprise ending while Proyas dwelt on it and dwelt on it. Plus there was a certain matter-of-fact tone to Heinlein's story that Knowing could have used in place of its more melodramatic attitude. And considering the fact that Heinlein's short story essentially argued that a large group of women removing their clothes in public was a sign of impending doom, that's saying something.
However, to each his own.
Labels: Alex Proyas, Mitología Nórdica, Nicolas Cage, Películas de Ciencia Ficción I, Películas Nuevas V, Presagio 2009, Roberto A. Heinlein
posted by Tonio Kruger at 2:03 AM
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