I saw this movie on Sunday, and walked out feeling like it was a big giant finger to all non-christians. But I wondered why I didn’t hear about what kind of movie it was. I had only heard that it was a sci-fi film and that it was hit or miss with reviewers. So I started looking for reviews about the movie with a religious slant. While many reviewers admitted there was a religious overtones, none seemed to blast it for the proselytizing movie I thought it was.
So I bring it here to the dopers… Am I reading too much into it?
The movie ends with the 2 children carrying bunnies running towards the Tree of Knowledge so they can start over. (Aren’t bunnies a representation of Christ? a la Easter)
The Aliens who take the children have wings and look like Angels.
Nicholas Cage is the only one who is prophesying about the end of the world and no one believes him.
Nicholas Cage’s father is a pastor who teaches Cage to accept death as part of God’s will.
I don’t know about Ezekiel, so maybe someone can explain what that was about.
There are more but I’ll open up the thread. I’d like to keep this thread from talking about plot/plot-holes, and stay on target about obvious/not so obvious religious parallels.
Nope. They’re a carry-over from pagan traditions. They represent fertility.
I haven’t see the movie, but are you sure it’s not actually a big giant finger to religion? Your description sounds like it’s telling people they’ve misinterpreted extraterrestrial activity as spiritual.
This movie was filled with religious theme’s. I just finished watching it and was amazed, and how closely it followed the biblical teachings. From the part where the learn the world is coming to an end, and the girl says “it’s the sun” to me sounds like “it’s the son” or son of god. Then the boy says “They sent a message to warn us all” how about the bible? he goes on to say “You can’t come only the children can enter the ones who heard the call” all through out the bible believers are called the children of god, when he says the ones who heard the call are the believers, then the father tells the son that he has to go, but he can’t make the decision for him, the boy has to “make the decision for himself”
All in all I thought the movie was interesting enough, but I wouldn’t watch it again
The reason the movie hasn’t drawn much attention or controversy, IMO, is that it’s intentionally vague on the points you made. People that want to see it as a confirmation of the Adam and Eve story and affirmation of religion will see it as that. People that want to see it as a confirmation of alien presence that contradicts religious imagery will see it as that. The film simply doesn’t take a position on the subject. The debate is if this was intentional or if the movie just did a bad job of getting it’s point across.
How is that possible? I did a search on the term Knowing in the title of Cafe Society threads… with no results! Well now my thread is the only one that comes up.
“Knowing” is a very common word, especially on the Dope. If you search for it in all forums it’s on the 5th or 6th page even though the thread is only a week and a half or so old. Hell, your thread is like 40 threads down when you just use “knowing” as a keyword.
Search for “knowing movie cage” in CS returns only 4 results and that thread is right there. There’s nothing wrong with the Search, just your choice of keywords.
Funny, I came out of the movie lauding it for playing equally to both sides of the fence. It quite literally gives both christains and secularists exactly what they want to see.
I dunno how the Op missed that.
(I also think the movie punked itself by having the aliens grab the kids. Incidentally.)
I found it preachy and philosophically ignorant. Cage’s character was a classic Hollywood atheist. He’s bitter and “lost his faith” because his wife died. I’m so tired of seeing atheists portrayed that way. They can never be atheists because of reasoned conclusions, it can only be because they’re disillusioned and angry because of something that happened to them. Usually it’s because their wife died (see Signs for another recent example). Movie atheists are never allowed to be happy either. They always have to be cynical and depressed.
There’s a scene in the movie where Cage is lecturing his class at MIT (yeah, he’s supposed to be a prof at MIT, but that’s probably the least preposterous thing we’re expected to believe), and he’s pontificating about “determinism” versus “randomness.” Only whoever wrote speech didn’t know what those words mean and he got it all wrong (Cage’s character thinks that determinism is basically equivalent to ID – that everything happens for a reason).
The whole thing was essentially toned down, fundy apocalypse porn. Angels, the strawmen atheists (not only Cage, but his colleague at MIT who utters the ridiculous line, “my scientific mind is telling me to reject this” when presented with extraordinary evidence of predictive prphecy), the horrifically cheesy Garden of Eden image at the end, Cage coming to decide, on the basis of a gigantic excluded middle, that the phenomena he’s witnessed prove there’s an afterlife.
I also though his sister was an obnoxious, pushy god-botherer, but the movie doesn’t know she’s obnoxious.
By the way, if these angels are so smart, why don’t they know you can’t actually repopulate a world with only one couple?
I did think the plane crash was cool. It was sudden and startling and looked realistically surreal.
Interesting. One of my Christian friends told me that it was the filled with themes from the book of revelations without overtly saying anything about the bible. He tends to see things that others might not say were really in a movie though, and I had not read or heard that anywhere else, so I took it with a grain of salt.
I saw it as a nod to ancient astronaut theory. Not that I believe there’s any basis to that school of thought but I think it has great potential in fiction.
The alien ship resembles Ezekiel’s description of the “wheel within a wheel” object that descended from “heaven”. Notice the production company is Ezekiel.
The reference to the sun is the literal sun, which turns out to be a spacecraft imparting knowledge of events to come.
When the aliens ascend to the ship with the children, the wisps of air or fog appear to be wings. I saw this as saying that the ancients mistook aliens for supernatural beings.
Quite refreshing to see a film take this approach. I was wincing at first thinking it was destined to be another spritual romp.
OK, I totally don’t understand this mindset- a movie has a possible spiritual theme/vaguely religious overtones, apparently does not actually endorse any particular creed or sect, and it’s supposed to be a personal insult to all non-Christians, even spiritual/religious ones?
Hmm, I’m agnostic but I think I can field this one. As an ex Christian I can honestly say that at the very beginning of my agnosticism, maybe 8 or 9 years old, whenever something seemingly unexplainable would happen I would wonder if just maybe God (the Christian god) had something to do with it. I didn’t wonder if Shiva did it, or Allah.
I was brought up Catholic so the default was the Christian god.
Maybe FlightlessBird is assuming Christianity is the standard everyone else must compare to?
This is facinating. I assume you know that Santa isn’t in the Bible, but you thought bunnies were somehow part of the Biblical version of Easter? There aren’t any eggs in the Bible version either, for the record.
I brought my daughter, who is a huge sci-fi/psy-thriller fan, to see this flick and she loved it for it’s sci-fi/psy-thriller type feel. And I admit, for the first 45 minutes of the film, I did too … even though I couldn’t suss out in my head where it was all going.
But when the religious imagery started to become a little more ubiquitous in the film, my blackened little heart could help but start to hate it. It was just that relavatory point where it dawned on me … this is basically “Left Behind” with better production values.
And I do think those production values were top notch. Excellent CGI, great ambient sound and soundtrack, action cuts that were both creepy and frenetic without resorting to unbridled “shakey-cam”.
But in the end, I was totally overwhelmed by what felt like a prostylization.
To **jimpatro’s **point, I may have seen it the same way – he said, “I saw this as saying that the ancients mistook aliens for supernatural beings” – but they didn’t approach it that way. In fact, there’s no resolution to the film that tells that they were aliens at all. I felt that by the end, we were supposed to accept the fact that they were angels, this is The Rapture, The Bible was right all along, not shut up and stroke your bunny.
I explained all the religious ramifications of the story to my daughter, but she still liked it anyway. “The plane crash was awesome,” I believe was her final say on the matter.
I haven’t seen the movie, and I’m curious how it was proseltyzing?
I’ve seen plenty of movies about aliens, and I haven’t come away thinking that the movie is trying to convince that these aliens really exist. Ditto for Clash of the Titans and the Greek pantheon. What is it about this movie that is sending the message that this is what you should believe? Why is Knowing not just a movie about angels in the same vein that Independence Day was just a movie about aliens?
Note: I’m not trying to bust your chops or argue that you’re overreacting. Like I said, I haven’t seen this movie, and I’m curious.
Perhaps “proseltyzation” (damn, that word always give me so much spelling trouble) is too strong a term. However, I don’t see how the viewer can ignore the overwhelming Christian angle the movie is coming from. In my view, the whole point to the movie was that the prophecies in the bible are true – and doesn’t the scientific community feel silly.
I don’t have a problem with movies that deal with Christianity or religious theory/myth/whatever, I just got a little ruffled that the story flowed from … here are the rational explanations of things to overt Rapture theory in which the viewer just had to accept that this is the way it is.
There were lots of ships at the end. Presumably they also carried children.
My big problem with the movie is something that’s standard with alien contact movies – they’re smart enough to get here, but not smart enough to communicate. Number two problem was the unnecessarily complicated plot device to get the two kids to the ship. It leaves a bunch of “What if” questions that can’t be answered.
