Premium Episode 176: Knowing (2009) Movie Night (Sample)
MIT professor Nicolas Cage ushers in the apocalypse. This time with numerology, scenes of horrifying carnage, a time capsule, goth children, and aliens/angels that look straight out of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. This Jake movie is everything-pilled.
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Music by Pontus Berghe. Editing by Corey Klotz.
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Welcome, listener, to Premium Chapter 176 of the QAnon Anonymous Podcast, the QAA Movie Night Knowing Episode.
As always, we are your hosts, Jake Rokitansky, Julian Fields, and Travis View.
Knowing is a film I am no stranger to.
I've seen it probably close to 10 times, and it is one of my favorite 2010s-era guilty pleasures.
For me, the movie scratches all the proper itches.
It's apocalyptic, it involves baking, decoding, Hidden symbols, aliens, Nick Cage losing his mind, Ben Mendelsohn, and of course, Christianity.
Now, I'll admit, the religious themes were lost on me when I first watched the film, but upon further viewings, it's undeniably a weird spin on the book of Genesis.
Wow.
It's also the book of Ezekiel, which is directly referenced in the film.
Correct, the book of Ezekiel.
And Travis, I was counting on you for some additional Christian knowledge as we work our way through this masterpiece.
Travis, famous biblical scholar.
Well, because it has to do with creationism, right?
Well, yes, yes.
It's a book of prophecy.
Also, the book of Ezekiel is a Jewish text, Jake.
Now hold on, wait a minute, I don't like your tone the way you said Jewish there.
Is that why you're vaping once again?
You can't defend your race while you vape.
Look, I wasn't planning on saying anything, I was gonna let Travis talk, and then he said something that triggered me a little bit, so I had to speak up.
But that's how podcasts work, you know, if you vape anytime you're like, oh I probably won't have something to say, and then you're a freaking blabbermouth.
Look, I can hear you still doing it.
This is how you do it.
This is how you do it.
How?
Show me how.
I don't know!
Show me how.
I'm just saying this is how you do it, not like I have a better way to do it.
Wait, so okay, so yes, it is from the original Hebrew Bible, the book of Ezekiel, right?
That's right, yep.
Yes, and I talk about this later, but a lot of alien-pilled folks will point to Ezekiel's Wheel, which features prominently in the second act and the climax of the film, as proof that the entities that are written about as gods, as deities in the Bible, are actually extraterrestrials.
Knowing was released in 2009 by Summit Entertainment, a label under the Lionsgate Films.
It was directed by Alex Proyas, who also directed The Crow, and wrote and directed Dark City, one of my favorite movies when I was growing up.
I'm gonna have to re-watch The Crow, because The Crow's probably Christian.
Like, this guy's a lunatic.
He also looks like the fucking judge in Blood Meridian.
No offense, but being Greek and just looking like a professional pedophile.
Yeah, I mean, when I was a kid, The Crow was cool.
I understood that it was very dark and cool, and of course there was the sort of mythology about Brandon Lee being killed during the filming.
But I wasn't an edgy enough kid to really obsess over it like a lot of my peers did at the time.
Let's not forget that Proyas killed Brandon Lee.
He was the director on the set where they fucking loaded that gun with real bullets.
It's on... It's on him.
He took that from us, and then he tried to sell us biblical bullshit.
That's true, it's true.
The movie was written by Ryan Douglas Pearson, Juliet Snowden, and Stiles White.
Snowden and White are a husband and wife creative duo, with White cutting his teeth in special effects, originally working for the Stan Winston Company.
He's done special effects for, like, Jurassic Park 3 and a bunch of other, like, big movies that I saw when I looked up his IMDb.
Snowden went on to write The Possession and Ouija.
Which is actually, you know, not a terrible horror movie, and the sequel's even better.
Better than it should be, anyways.
Knowing had a production budget of $50 million and went on to gross $180 million at the box office, so not a runaway success, but not a flop either.
All of that money went to setting human beings on fire.
I know!
Well, we actually get into one of the reviews because at the time of its release, the critics were not impressed.
Edward Porter of The Times UK had this to say about the film.
As well as being perversely pessimistic for a blockbuster, it's rendered tedious by a dense plot and lifeless characters.
Even M. Night Shyamalan would have done a better job.
How dare such an empty film ask us to endure many realistic scenes of carnage?
Yes, that's the first time I ever agree with The Times.
Yeah, I kind of agree with him as well.
Also, like, they ran out of budget so they couldn't get Nick Cage any sideburns.
I was expecting this episode to open up with Julian saying like, first off, Nick Cage looks awful in this film.
His hair, oh, you can see the plug shining through the light.
I sat and I watched it with Mathilde and I said, uh, Nick Cage looks like shit.
And she's like, oh, you can't call Nick Cage ugly on the podcast.
Well, Nick Cage looks like shit in this movie.
So going back to the, the, uh, reviewer, um, I agree as much as I like the movie, I sort of agree with him.
The movie does have some of the most intense mass carnage scenes I've ever seen.
And perhaps it is because of this that has become somewhat of a cult classic.
You also have passable performances from a young Rose Byrne, fresh off a hot streak of starring in Sunshine by Danny Boyle and 28 Weeks Later, and of course, who could forget the God King Ben Mendelsohn, who always hits no matter what kind of shitty dialogue you throw at him.
And in this movie, it's pretty shitty.
Ben, if you're listening, please come on the podcast.
Yeah, he's great.
Also, unbeknownst to many, the movie also features future Australian hunk Liam Hemsworth in a tiny bit part with one line.
Oh really?
Mm-hmm.
Yep, and I got it.
I clipped it.
So let's get into it.
Okay.
The film opens with a flashback.
We're in Lexington, Massachusetts, 1959.
Angle on, your classic dark-haired outcast girl looking up at the heavens as strange paranormal whispers bombard her brain.
This is Lucinda Embry.
In the classroom, her teacher announces that Lucinda's idea has won the class project
to bury a time capsule in front of the school to be dug up in 50 years.
Each student is tasked with drawing a picture of what they think the future might look like.
While the rest of the kids draw spaceships and dogs that live forever, Lucinda runs out
the clock scribbling strings of numbers on her paper.
When the teacher calls time and Lucinda is interrupted, she sneaks away to continue writing
her numbers on a wooden door using her nails.
Why couldn't she have grabbed another piece of paper?
I don't know.
I guess maybe because she needed to ensure that future generations would be able to find the last set of numbers.
But what if the door got replaced?
I don't know.
I guess she was just counting on the laziness and lack of budget from the school administration.
Poorly funded public schools save the day.
Yeah.
You know what, though?
I fucking love this.
Time capsules, to me, are always interesting.
They're kind of weird.
It's kind of a weird thing that we do.
You don't hear about time capsules a lot anymore, I guess because we've got the internet, but that used to be, like, a really cool thing that you would do with your class, or, you know, another school would do it, and, you know.
Do you guys ever have to put stuff in a time capsule?
Who needs a time capsule when you have Facebook memories to remind you of people who passed away in your life or whatever?
I know!
The internet has ruined some of these mysterious things that we would do to pass the time in school.
By the way, you mentioned Lexington, Massachusetts.
This movie is entirely filmed in Australia, and it's set in Boston and New York.
Is it really?
Do you know that for sure?
Yeah, I looked it up.
Oh, shit.
Guess where I found it?
Wikipedia.
So this tells me that your research has gone far and wide on this.
Come on, you know that my movie night research never strays too far from the Wikia.
When we're introduced to Nick Cage's character, John, for the first time, he's looking through a telescope and simultaneously grilling.
It's the ultimate grill pill.
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