Proyas to Produce a Film with No Script from a Book...That's Not Written

Boy, Hollywood sure has a lot of faith in author Daniel H. Wilson.  First off, Steven Spielberg is planning on using his “Robopocalypse” (ridiculous name) as one of his next projects, and has been planning so since before the book even hit stores.   Now, Summit Entertainment has plans to turn Wilson’s new novel, “AMP,” into a feature film with Dark City’s Alex Proyas as the producer.  Thing is, Wilson hasn’t even finished writing it yet.  Now that’s confidence.  Or Summit is that eager to jump on Speilberg’s potential Wilson-run money train. 

Just so you know: Bald Guy Proyas is on the right, Planet Earth is on the left.

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Sam Worthington Will Be Alex Proyas' 'Dracula'

Maybe other people use this phrase, too, but because in this industry you hear a lot of stories that make headlines and never fully develop (hey, we've all gotta fill space on the magic netterwebs), I like saying that this or that is "officially official," reconfirming what we thought had already been confirmed but apparently hadn't.

Of course, with Sam Worthington, you should always check for the officially official label first because he's prone to change his mind about a project pretty quickly. While I thought he was all-in for Dracula: Year Zero, that apparently just happend. So now he's officially official. The movie's the latest from Alex Proyas, meaning it's hard to discount it right away, no matter how much vampire schlock there is in theaters and on TV. Knowing that, you can put two and two together and figure out that this is a Dracula origin story, more specifically, how Vlad the Impaler became known as a vampire.

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Movie Review - 'Knowing'

Knowing Starring Nicolas Cage, Rose Byrne, and Chandler Canterbury Directed by Alex Proyas Rated PG-13

During a lecture, MIT astrophysics professor John Koestler (Nicolas Cage) asks his students to define and differentiate randomness and determinism. Determinism, answers one student, is the belief that a chain of events leads to a specific conclusion, that there is an order to things. Randomness is exactly what it sounds like. Though those scientific principles have something to do with with story in Knowing, they can also be found in the very structure of the screenplay: Obviously, there is an intended direction, but some aspects are so chaotic, you wonder how in the hell it ever got to where it was going. I love the idea of time capsules. To see what the past thought of the future is a great exercise. And it's used very effectively here, a device that sets the world of Knowing in motion. Koestler's son, Caleb (Chandler Canterbury), attends a grade school where 50 years earlier, a time capsule was buried to mark the opening of the school. When it is unearthed, Caleb is handed an envelope placed in the capsule by a student half a century earlier. Was he randomly chosen to select the envelope, or was it somehow determined? What's inside the envelope is a cryptic string of numbers, which Caleb's father decides develop into a pattern that predicts the great worldwide tragedies of the previous five decades, like the downed flight over Lockerbie, Scotland, the 9/11 attacks, earthquakes, and more.

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Getting to Know New 'Knowing' Clips

The only reason I have much hope at all for Knowing is because it was directed by Alex Proyas. Proyas directed I, Robot and The Crow, but his best film is Dark City, an impossibly atmospheric future noir released in 1998. Not too many people saw it, but in a year with Saving Private Ryan, Dark City was Roger Ebert's top film. Check out the DVD for Ebert's great commentary about the movie, something he very rarely provided.

I don't believe Knowing will be as good as Dark City or The Crow, but I'm willing to give him the benefit of the doubt, even though a movie with a numerical code that pinponts all the world's great disasters that also stars Nicolas Cage is, in my opinion, operating with a disadvantage before the trailers even start. Here are a couple more clips from Knowing, including the first very good CG disaster effect of 2009 shown in its entirety.

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Nic Cage Runs Around in a New 'Knowing' Clip

I remember distinctly my argument against City of Angels, which was, in essence, if a guy who looked and acted like Nic Cage popped up everywhere you went, dressed in a trenchcoat, and lived in the library, why in the world would you fall for him? Wouldn't you just run in fear?

Same rules, different set of circumstances, for this clip from Knowing. The premise is that there's some odd numeric code that has predicted every major catastrophe in the world over the past half century or something. In fact, that's where all this A-Rod news first broke. True story. Anyway, Cage can read the code so he now knows when the calamitous events will happen. But what happens when the numbers stop? In the clip, Cage is imploring people to get off the subway, and honestly, if a guy who looked and acted like Nic Cage ran up to you on a subway train and told you to get out, would you? Yes. Definitely. Just get me as far away as possible.

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