Here's to Knowing

SPOILER ALERT: If you plan on seeing the movie Knowing anytime soon (which I beg you NOT to see), read no further.  I saw it last night, and there's 2+ hours and $8.50 that I can never get back.

For me, nothing can ruin a movie as fast as aliens can.  Aliens are the ultimate cop-out!  Hmm.  How is all this freaky stuff happening? How are they going to resolve this movie?  How are they going to work themselves out of THAT? The answer: ALIENS.  They can solve any problem because they have no set rules they are expected to live by.  Which is exactly what makes them suck.

Okay, to illustrate the need for rules when making supernatural creatures/worlds, think of Stephenie Meyer's Breaking Dawn vs. J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.  Breaking Dawn sucked because there were not previously set rules that her vampires had to abide by.  Stephenie made new rules up at the END of the story in order to make sense of everything. (Think Bella suddenly being able to get pregnant, Edward suddenly having the restraint to not kill Bella while they...nevermind, the sudden occurence of half-vampire, half-human babies, etc.)  

Then, look at the 7th Harry Potter.  It was amazing because J.K. Rowling stuck to all the RULES she made for her supernatural world in the preceding books.  She didn't suddenly throw in something like, "Actually, Harry has this unknown spell up his sleeve that is perfectly tailored to kill Lord Voldemort." (That's exactly what happened in Breaking Dawn, except it was Bella's sudden possession of a super-power that could take out the Volturi without even swinging a punch--or snapping some vampire teeth.) No, Harry could only kill Voldemort according to the magical rules Rowling set up in the preceding 6 books.  And while the 7th Harry Potter did have a few twists, they didn't make anything in the previous books obsolete.  The twists correlated perfectly with all the old material.

SO. I don't know if that argument even makes sense, but now you see why aliens suck.  Because they have absolutely rules to live by. Who's that guy that keeps appearing creepily in the forest in Knowing and then disappearing?  Why is he bothering their family?  Why can the son hear whispering and what does it mean?  How is this woman able to predict the future with all these numbers--a loophole in science? Aliens.  That's the answer they give us.  And it's the only answer they need to give.  Booooooooo.

I think Knowing is possibly the WORST movie I have ever seen.  I can take cheesy plots, sad endings, or endings that make no sense any day.  As long as it's not Knowing, where I spent two hours of my life being absolutely terrified by the creepy people that keep showing up in the forest by Nicolas Cage's house, then felt that terror ebb into something entirely different: outrage.  Because, seriously? Did I spend a whole movie being scared of all this creepiness, when it was just aliens (things that don't scare me AT ALL because they don't exist)?  And then, did I spend an entire movie watching Nicolas Cage try to figure out how to save the world, to watch the ENTIRE EARTH (and all its inhabitants, including Nicolas Cage) blow up from a super-solar flare at the end?  AND THEN, did said aliens really resolve the whole problem by taking two earth children, a boy and a girl, out into space and onto another earth-like planet to become the next Adam and Eve?  Yeah, that really happened.

When the UFO finally came down to pick up the chosen earthlings, my roommate and I were beyond annoyed.  I looked around at everyone else watching the movie to see if they felt the same annoyance at this ending as I did, but apparently they didn't.  And when the children got dropped off by the aliens on their new planet, started frolicking through fields of grain in white outfits, then walked toward a bright, white, fruit-bearing, divine-looking tree (Hmm. Knowledge of Good and Evil?), I had had ENOUGH.  I laughed until I cried.  I didn't even care that everyone in the movie was shooting me annoyed glances.  Honestly.  The whole earth BLEW UP at the end.  All of the human race was entirely wiped out, save two children abducted by aliens and dropped off onto another planet to "multiply and replenish."  I'm sorry, but that is the most outrageous, most ridiculous ending I've ever heard of.

Wish I would've KNOWN how bad that movie was.