I am a witness to many terrible movies. I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Teenagers turned into vegetables. Racist talking babies and Scott Baio. I watched Art Carney and a cast who should have known better butcher Star Wars through the medium of television variety show. All those memories will forever be wedged into the folds of my mind where they shall slowly decay whatever is left of my sanity. But lo, how I was unprepared for what my eyes would gaze upon while watching Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed.
I have seen “documentaries” and YouTube rants on both sides of the Intelligent Design argument (I am using “argument” here as I cannot find a word in the dictionary that means “two cats simultaneous vomiting on one another”). In other words, I went into this movie expecting shit. You and I both already know Expelled is going to denounce evolution and promote Intelligent Design. The writers will use terrible logic and the worst of evidence (Google “The Atheist’s Nightmare”). I was expecting at least something that resembled an argument and possibly some decent production from a movie that actually made it to theaters rather than just the YouTube homepage. However that is not what we get with Expelled. Instead we get incoherent ramblings and impenitent manipulation.
I could write pages tearing apart these arguments, but why bother. Quite frankly, I stopped caring. What I find more interesting is how bad the film itself is. I want to focus on the film as the documentary it is trying to be.
The Movie as a Movie
In this independent film, Ben Stein explains … let’s stop right there. This film is narrated by Ben Stein, a guy whose acting career is based around his painfully monotone voice and his attempts at dry humor. Ninety-seven minutes of his agonizing voice are enough to earn any film a special place in Movie Hell. I discover that after a few Excedrins you can stop the anguish long enough to actually hear what he is saying. Then, you have to restrain yourself from downing the rest of the bottle.
After Stein’s narration, the next big problem with the movie is structure. The movie is all over the place. It is as if the editors stockpiled footage and then spliced them together alphabetically. In fact, the movie’s lack of structure is making it painfully difficult for me to write this review. Another related problem is pacing. Unfortunately I left my bullshit filter on before starting the film. The rapid-fire volley of interviews and hollow rhetoric overloaded my brain. It forced me to pause the DVD every five minutes to let my mind processes the queue of incoming garbage.
The interviews themselves are awful. Half of the frames focus on Ben Stein and his immense eyebrows as they react to a guy from the Discovery Institute saying “Evolution doesn’t have all the answers.” Stein’s role in all of these interviews is to ask baiting questions. He will ask “Doesn’t Darwin explain … ?”, then the interviewee will respond with profound but nonsensical statements like “It’s not the whole picture!”. Then we have to watch Stein fake a eureka moment while the two wooly caterpillars on his face are mating. Occasionally the interviews are punctuated by stock footage of 60’s educational films or Ben Stein trying to be funny in a classroom.
Support for Intelligent Design
The only supporting argument for Intelligent Design comes to us at the beginning. Not the beginning of the movie. The beginning of the DVD menu. Before the menu options appear on the screen, we are treated with a thirty second clip of Ben Stein in a middle school biology class. Stein asks the instructor, “Why did life begin in the first place?” (Notice the baiting “why”.) After the instructor stumbles to answer, Stein rhetorically answers his own question with the question “Could there have been an intelligent designer?” The screen cuts to a sassy black girl giving a “mmhmm” head shimmy approval. That is it. Their entire argument is based on “Why not?” Here is another argument to consider. All of the elementary subatomic particles are made from very tiny manatees and Ewoks playing volleyball. Why not? My evidence for this? Why. The. Fuck. Not? So let’s review:
Premise 1: God created life
Premise 2: Why not?
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Conclusion: God rules!
At the very least, the film could have showed us examples of things in nature that the writers believed were designed. Show me a human eye and go, “This looks engineered.” Show me a banana and say, “This must have been designed by some guiding intelligence.”
Bashing Evolution
Expelled seems to be confused about what evolution is. For clarity, TheFreeDictionary.com (as well as every other dictionary and textbook I have ever found) define evolution as “noun. Change in the genetic composition of a population during successive generations, as a result of natural selection acting on the genetic variation among individuals, and resulting in the development of new species.” The film starts by denouncing evolution and claims modern scientists are holding steadfast to an idea which has been confirmed to be false. One guest even boldly declares that scientists do not know what a species is. They cast doubt as to whether natural selection alone could have caused life to appear as it does on Earth. Then, a later interviewee says evolution and natural selection can explain changes within a species, but not the formation of new species. A few minutes later another guest says that evolution is correct and can explain everything … except the origin of life on Earth … and therefore it is wrong again. When making a good argument, start with defining certain vocabulary words like “evolution” and “intelligent design”. Then stick with those definitions. Even if your definition for evolution is wrong, go with it. Changing the meaning of words mid-film shows everyone you have no idea what you are talking about.
By the end of the movie, Expelled claims the theory of evolution is the cause of communism, atheism, fascism, the Holocaust, and eugenics (the last three are the focus of the last third of the film). Comparisons are made between scientists rejecting Intelligent Design and the Soviets building the Berlin Wall. The word “freedom” is uttered frequently throughout the film. None of this is arguing or debating. This is name calling. Very bad name calling at that. “Booger breath” is a more clever insult.
Not using the G-word
Ben Stein and the pro-ID folks are careful to not directly say “God did it” or show any signs of a religious agenda. They fail miserably. During his interview with scientist Richard Sternberg, Stein sits a rhetorical softball on the tee for his guest to knock out of the park. Stein asks “Isn’t Intelligent Design just saying God did it?” Sternberg responses with “Not necessarily […] Intelligent design is a minimal commitment, scientifically, to the possibly of detecting intelligent causation.” That is the kind of statement which makes blood gush from most people’s eye sockets. It is like saying, “That is no horse. That is a large hooved mammal which has four legs, a short-haired coat, a mane, a tail, and a love of sugar cubes that has been domesticated since ancient times by man to aid in carrying loads, to leisurely ride on sunny days, and to frighten small children.”
Conclusion
I knew this movie would be terrible, but I was astonished by just how terrible. I went into this expecting a film with weak arguments base
d on lousy premises. What I got was over an hour and a half of poorly-developed commentary I could have read in the comments section of a YouTube video. In this film there is no argument, supposed argument, or reheated bean curd masquerading as an argument. While it boldly declares “let’s debate this”, the film never really tries to make an argument. It is mere name calling. I expected better than this, especiall
y from someone with Ben Stein’s prestigious background. Regardless of their beliefs, he and the other writers of the film could have at least tried to make an argument. Perhaps they truly believe they made a good film. In which case, God help us all.
Rating
I give this film the back half of a Jesus fish.
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