Blu-ray Movie Reviews

In 1958, as part of the dedication ceremony for a new elementary school, a group of students is asked to draw pictures to be stored in a time capsule. But one mysterious girl fills her sheet of paper with rows of apparently random numbers instead. Fifty years later, a new generation of students examines the capsule's contents and the girl's cryptic message ends up in the hands of young Caleb Koestler. But it's Caleb's father, professor John Koestler, who makes the startling discovery that the encoded message predicts with pinpoint accuracy the dates, death tolls and coordinates of every major disaster of the past 50 years. As John further unravels the document's chilling secrets, he realizes the document foretells three additional events - the last of which hints at destruction on a global scale and seems to somehow involve John and his son.

Fans of director Alex Proyas have been chomping at the bit for a return to Dark City form for quite sometime now. This film puts him back in the sci-fi thriller category, but the picture lacks the dark tones and cutting edge feel of his earlier works. The film still succeeds in the thrills department though and delivers a pretty good time overall. Some of the acting seems a bit forced considering the caliber of the cast and I felt the score was a tad annoying, but I still enjoyed it.

Knowing was captured on the Red camera with a native resolution of 4K. This is the first feature film I know of shot on this camera so I was excited to see how it translated to home video. The Blu-ray transfer is indeed quite good but I didn’t think it was a clear step up from what we’ve seen with other digitally captured films to date. Fine detail is exceptional though and the image has a great sense of dimension and depth. I was impressed with the darker sequences, which typically look a tad flat with digital cameras. The Red seemed to do fine with shadow detail and contrast overall. Colors are a bit amped at times but this lends to the rich look of the imagery. Some softening of fine detail is noticed but hardly distracting.

The soundtrack is presented in DTS-HD Master Audio and features a rich soundstage and impressive low end response. There are quite a few intense action scenes in this film and the sound design makes the most of the situations with incredible dynamic range and panning effects. Low bass extension is nearly system threatening and there are some great infrasonic touches. Dialogue sounds very natural in tone and balance and the spatial design of the mix floats throughout the soundstage. The score can be a bit intrusive at times and I found it a bit tedious at times.

Extras include a feature commentary with the director and two features on the film and its themes.

While not as groundbreaking as his previous films, Knowing was still better than I was expecting given the trailers. This ground has been covered before, but it was still a decent ride.