MIT’s Remedial Science Classes — Also: Knowing is a huge piece of shit

There’s a brief scene in the terrible new Nicholas Cage/Alex Proyas special effects thriller where Nicholas Cage, reputed astrophysicist, is teaching a class at MIT. It isn’t really clear what this class is… whether they’re undergraduate or graduate students. There are space-y decorations around the room, so I guess it could be assumed that it’s some kind of astronomy or astrophysics class. He says, more or less, that he’s going to introduce them to some ideas, that might help get the ball rolling for their term papers.

It is important, here, to use the classic Nicholas Cage voice while playing out this dialogue in your head.

“There are, like, two different ways of viewing the universe, man, the theory of, like, determinism, and whoa, random chance. Determinism is, like everything happens for a reason, and random chance is all of this is the result of random chemical reactions and genetic mutations.”

He tosses around a ball that’s been painted to look like the sun while asking random facts about the sun. The kids in the class know how hot the sun is, and that it has a bunch of hydrogen in it. Whoa! Excellent work! Class dismissed!

Meanwhile, there’s a chalkboard behind him with some hardcore space Calculus that goes unmentioned (but the camera lingers on it for a moment… You see that there? That’s some fucking MATH right there. This guy is a fucking genius).

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I can barely formulate a response to this. It should be easy, considering how common this sickness is.

Dear Everyone Who Is Ever Going to Make a Movie,

DO NOT PUT A CLASSROOM SCENE IN YOUR FUCKING MOVIE UNLESS YOU HAVE ACTUALLY ATTENDED A COMPARABLE CLASS YOURSELF. THAT MEANS EVERYONE INVOLVED.

That means, go to a local University or Community Fucking College, and tell them you’re a fucking screenwriter or film director or actor, and ask to sit through one or five of their classes on X (here, Astrophysics… I think).

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Right now, the CLASSROOM SCENE is brain-damaged screenwriter shorthand for “I want to say something directly to my audience, but that seems clumsy, so instead, I’ll have a bunch of twenty-somethings stand in for my audience, and I’ll be represented by the lecturer.” It can also be screenwriter shorthand for “I have no fucking idea what I’m doing.” In Knowing, it seems to be a bit of both.

One. University level science lecture, even the most fun and entertaining ones, tend to be pretty information dense. The lecturer tends not to quiz his students on fucking random trivia, but rather, if he’s going to be asking questions at all, it’s going to be something the requires a proper understanding of the material, usually involving problem solving or mathematics.

Two. Gibberish. His entire “science” lecture comes across as pseudo-religious mumbo jumbo, even though it’s stated in the film that Nicholas Cage is an atheist (formerly a Catholic). He says, “Why, dude, is it, like, that our Earth is at the exact right position from the sun for life to survive… did this happen for a reason, or was it, like, you know, random chance?” His students, apparently all members of MIT’s Special Education Program (I didn’t know they had this) have no rebuttal. Lottery winners. Lottery winners must think, “Why me? How is it that I picked the exact right numbers… it must be magic, a miracle.” Whoever wins the lottery always reels at the specialness of their improbable victory, but SOMEONE ALWAYS WINS THE FUCKING LOTTERY. That is a statistical inevitability. With all of the galaxies and all of the stars and all of the planets (we suspect) in the universe (and that, only the universe that we can see), it seems pretty fucking likely that there are going to be some planets formed in the habitable zone with the right basic materials to get this life thing started. We won the lottery, so obviously we’re able to look at our improbable position and marvel at how unlikely it is that we’re all here… but it had to happen to someone, somewhere. He then tells the students that he thinks it’s all just random chance and coincidence. A scientist. A man who by all means, should believe in things only when there are sensible reasons and explanations, has made exactly zero arguments for how all of this can happen without a capital R reason behind it, but he believes it anyway.

His class is enraptured. His MIT class. His class that must have been top of the fucking pile at their respective high schools or colleges across America, now attending arguably the most prestigious science school in the world, are completely satisfied with this, the stupidest science lecture they have likely ever heard. And another scientist has walked into the room, partway through the lecture. He has heard this. He walks up to Nicholas Cage and he says, “That’s some heavy stuff, bro.”

Not, “That’s the stupidest fucking lecture I’ve ever heard, turn in your science gun and your science badge.”

At a point, later in the film, there’s this guy in the woods that’s creeping out Nicholas Cage and his kid, so Nicholas Cage heads out into the woods with a flashlight and bat, and he shouts, “You want some of this?” and then he hits an innocent bystanding Tree with the bat… implying that the “this” in his statement was, in fact, referring to getting hit with a bat. Judging by audience response, this was the funniest scene in the movie. It was clearly not meant to be.

I’m about to spoil some things.

It’s aliens. Aliens have known everything all along. The creepy whispering people that gave kids dates and times for disasters and eventually the end of the world: Aliens.

Here’s an interview with the Director, in which he talks about how Knowing is a Science Fiction movie… that it had started off as a supernatural story, but when he came aboard, he made it science fiction instead.

Here’s a fun fact: Taking a supernatural story and then using aliens to explain your mystical shit doesn’t make it Science Fiction. For fuck’s sake, were you raised by monkeys?

Plot summary: some kids have the ability to know of future dates when terrible distasters will occur, culminating with the end of the world. They know this because they’re being whispered to by creepy dudes. The creepy dudes turn out to be aliens. Turns out the sun is going to shit out a major solar flare that will destroy all life on Earth. Aliens save some children, and take them to outer space garden of Eden. Earth dies. The end.

These Aliens have starships cabable of fucking interstellar travel. These Aliens apparently have a computer which is so fucking huge and advanced that it was able to predict the behaviours of the Earth’s sun to the fucking day, at least five decades in advance. Behaviour that almost certainly depends on everything going on in Sol, right down to small scale quantum interactions.

As in, they have a super computer inconceivably powerful, they are capable of changing their form to appear humanoid, they are capable of communicating.

And.

And they decide to be really creepy trenchcoat-wearing dudes who whisper confusing number information to children? With all of that power, they decide to be creepy and confusing? There is no way imaginable that they could be capable of the things shown in the film, and simply lack the necessary skills to speak directly, or you know, to a broader group than little children. So, essentially, we have beings that behave like otherworldly ghost beings, or incomprehensible angels. But it’s Science Fiction, because they’re aliens. Aliens who act like spooky horror movie characters for no fucking reason. Aliens who had absolutely all of the necessary capabilities to save the Earth, but did not, for no reason.

It’s not science fiction if you take your spooky otherworldly ghost or incomprehensible angels, and give them a fucking spaceship.

Also, none of what we’ve seen in the film matters.

None of it.

The world ends, Nicholas Cage dies. His kid and his kid’s new friend are taken away by the aliens. And it would have fucking happened anyway. It’s clearly shown that plenty of other kids are taken, so even if they had all died of spontaneous combustion halfway through the film, the whole Human Race Carries On thing still happens. The last scene with Nicholas Astrophysicist Cage is with his parents and sister, finally reconciled after years without communication. And even that, we can assume, might have happened anyway, you know, because he would have known about the world ending regardless (it’s announced on television near the end of the movie… turns out, those fucks at NASA knew all along), and his kid would have been kidnapped by Aliens anyway… same result.

Nothing that happened in this movie mattered, even within the context of the movie. And the movie itself is a huge piece of shit. Kind of a one-two punch.

It had some pretty decent special effect sequences, though.

And I think it’s the first summer event movie shot on the Red camera. It looked good, looked like film… which I guess is the whole point. I saw Pontypool, also shot on the Red camera, last week. It was better.