Monthly Archives: May 2009

Set Phasers to Awesome: Star Trek

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Star Trek movie poster

 

Like the 1966 Corvette a reck­less young James Tiberius Kirk com­man­deers in an early sequence, the new Star Trek is precision-crafted for speed, sex appeal, and total awe­some­ness. Kirk launches that beau­ti­ful machine off a cliff, but thank­fully direc­tor J.J. Abrams never does the same with the movie. Star Trek (the first in the fran­chise to go by the per­fectly terse name of the orig­i­nal TV series) joins the rar­i­fied ranks of the few other mod­ern block­busters that thrill and enter­tain (not to men­tion cost and earn mas­sive piles of money) yet have last­ing merit. Make room on the DVD shelf for a new entry in the canon, along­side Jaws, E.T.: The Extrater­res­trial, The Lord of the Rings tril­ogy, Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back, and Spider-Man 2.

Trek has a long tra­di­tion of uti­liz­ing the sci­ence fic­tion con­ceits of time travel and alter­nate dimen­sions to play­fully sub­vert its char­ac­ters and mythos. The orig­i­nal series intro­duced the Mir­ror Uni­verse, giv­ing the cast the chance to rein­ter­pret their goodly char­ac­ters in hairier, eviler alter egos. Two of the best movies brought the Enter­prise back in time, first to save the whales in the 1980s (in the light­hearted Star Trek IV: The Voy­age Home), and later to wit­ness Earth­lings’ first con­tact with an alien race in 2063 (in the under­rated Star Trek VIII: First Con­tact). Two of my per­sonal favorite Next Gen­er­a­tion episodes “Yesterday’s Enter­prise” and “All Good Things” tasked Cap­tain Picard with course-correcting an Enter­prise skip­ping through time, no mat­ter the sac­ri­fice. The fun in these kinds of sto­ries comes not just from their brain-teasing sci-fi con­cepts, but in enjoy­ing new twists on the estab­lished char­ac­ters fans love. But any real inno­va­tions were always only tem­po­rary, the sta­tus quo always quickly restored in time (so to speak) for the next episode.

Anton Yelchin, Chris Pine, Simon Pegg, John Cho, and Zoe Saldana in Star Trekall hands on deck

Thus, the Star Trek fran­chise has man­aged to main­tain a sin­gle (albeit mas­sively com­pli­cated) time­line across six TV series, ten movies, and count­less nov­els and comic books. There’s even a niche mar­ket in the con­ti­nu­ity data itself, as evi­denced by pop­u­lar wikis like Mem­ory Alpha and ref­er­ence tomes such as Star Trek Chronol­ogy: The His­tory of the Future. Such cat­a­logs of the incred­i­bly com­plex future “his­tory” in which Trek is set are use­ful not only to obses­sive fans, but also to the writ­ers charged with cre­at­ing new sto­ries that don’t con­tra­dict what came before, at least too badly.

A cer­tain degree of renewal was already built right in to Star Trek. When any one premise ran out of ideas, an ensem­ble aged beyond plau­si­bil­ity, or rat­ings dipped, the pro­duc­ers could always start over with a new ship, a new space sta­tion, or in a new year. The most rad­i­cal depar­ture yet attempted was the ulti­mately dis­ap­point­ing final series, Enter­prise. The pre­quel, set years before Kirk would take the helm, got off to a great start with a Starfleet crew a world apart from any we had seen before. As many have pointed out over the years, Star Trek cre­ator Gene Rod­den­berry may have mod­eled Starfleet on the Navy, but the orig­i­nal 1960s series was basi­cally a West­ern set in space. The 1980s The Next Gen­er­a­tion recon­ceived Starfleet as kind of trans-species peace­keep­ing fleet, a kind of U.N. of The Milky Way. So, set between Earth­lings’ rough-and-tumble early space­far­ing years and the later ide­al­is­tic inter­galac­tic coöper­a­tion, Enter­prise fea­tured a bunch of cocky cow­boys brazenly tak­ing their val­ues out with them into space, base­ball caps firmly screwed on heads, and phasers defi­antly set to kill. The series seemed poised to be a some­what obvi­ous but fruit­ful metaphor for an arro­gant, George W. Bush-era United States forcibly spread­ing democ­racy where it wasn’t wel­come. But its qual­ity (both in writ­ing and in spe­cial effects bud­get) bot­tomed out in just a few episodes, and even the smoking-hot, well-endowed Vul­can T’Pol (Jolene Blalock) couldn’t keep the show on the air.

Zoe Saldana in Star TrekUhura mod­els the lat­est in 23rd Cen­tury Blue­tooth fashions

The entire Star Trek fran­chise seemed all but dead after Enter­prise’s can­cel­la­tion, not unlike the no-win sce­nario Spock devises as a test to tor­ture Starfleet cadets to see how they cope with fail­ure. A cher­ished part of Star Trek lore is that Kirk doesn’t believe in no-win sce­nar­ios, and thus cheated in order to win Spock’s unwinnable test. Para­mount evi­dently learned a les­son from Kirk’s lat­eral think­ing, for the first they they have given the OK to an irrev­er­ent new cre­ative team to per­ma­nently reboot Trek from top to bot­tom. Nearly all of Trek’s metic­u­lously main­tained con­ti­nu­ity (except­ing, iron­i­cally, the failed Enter­prise, set chrono­log­i­cally before any of the events of this movie) has now for­ever been rede­fined as belong­ing to an alter­nate time­line. At least, that is, until the next reboot. As the heavily-advertised appear­ance of Leonard Nimoy as the orig­i­nal “Spock Prime” attests, noth­ing nec­es­sar­ily pre­cludes the reap­pear­ance of any beloved orig­i­nal actors or other kinds of crossovers between time­lines (any­thing in pos­si­ble in sci­ence fic­tion). But Star Trek does mark a very clear end to Star Trek as we knew it.

After 40 years of unre­li­able qual­ity con­trol and dimin­ish­ing box office, such dras­tic mea­sures were arguably essen­tial to pre­serve Trek as a viable fran­chise. But I do sym­pa­thize with the grum­bling of long­time fans upset at scrap­ping every­thing and start­ing over. And this is not even to men­tion the many writ­ers, direc­tors, and actors that cre­ated the no-longer canon­i­cal sto­ries. All of which hasn’t dis­ap­peared from our real­ity, and will be enjoyed for­ever on DVD, but this film does ren­der pretty much every­thing that came before it as second-class Trek. I can’t help but won­der how all future spin­offs are now going to be han­dled on a prac­ti­cal level. For instance, if there are to be future comics or nov­els fea­tur­ing the char­ac­ters from The Next Gen­er­a­tion, are the phys­i­cal prod­ucts going to have to be labelled as tak­ing place in the now-depricated orig­i­nal fic­tional uni­verse? How does “Trek Clas­sic” and “Neu Trek” sound?

Chris Pine and Zachary Quinto in Star TrekSpock has had enough Kirk and can’t take it anymore

But back to the topic at hand: the totally awe­some new movie is packed with glossy art direc­tion, gen­uinely excit­ing spe­cial effects, fight scenes, chase sequences, and attrac­tive young actors young and attrac­tive enough to strut about on the big screen in their space scant­ies. Despite all this gloss, it some­how man­ages to not be totally stu­pid, which is more than This Dork Reporter can say about your typ­i­cal sum­mer movie (*cough* Trans­form­ers *cough*). How­ever, I can’t help but point out a few, for­give me, illog­i­cal plot ele­ments, espe­cially in the mad rush towards the end:

  • Why does Kirk bother fir­ing upon Nero’s ship as it’s being torn apart by a black hole? The Dork Report’s No-Prize answer: maybe Kirk feared Nero would time travel yet again to cre­ate mis­chief in yet another time­line (hey, there’s always the inevitable next reboot in a few years).
  • Starfleet is busy else­where in the galaxy, so we see the cadets mobi­lized into a strike force to con­front Nero. So why is the Acad­emy still full of stu­dents when Nero’s ship reaches Earth? The Dork Report’s No-Prize answer: maybe they were Fresh­men not qual­i­fied to do more than merely swab the decks.
  • It’s wildly implau­si­ble for young Spock to maroon Kirk on the same planet that Nero did Spock Prime. The Dork Report’s No-Prize answer: nope, I got noth­ing. I mean, really, come on! (but still, the movie is awe­some, just go with it)
  • The hard­est plot point to swal­low is why Spock Prime does not accom­pany Kirk back to the Enter­prise. Would he really risk the fate of Earth because he thinks it’s more impor­tant that Kirk and his young self forge their des­tined friend­ship? The Dork Report’s No-Prize answer: yes.

But enough com­plain­ing. Did I men­tion the movie is TEH AWESOME? There’s not one bad per­for­mance to drag things down (a notable prob­lem with Watch­men — read The Dork Report review). Despite being tasked with recre­at­ing char­ac­ters beloved by fans for over 40 years, no one attempts an out­right imi­ta­tion or car­i­ca­ture. The most faith­ful is Zachary Quinto as Spock. Beyond his eerie phys­i­cal resem­blance to Nimoy (maybe not how he actu­ally looked in 1966, but how he might have), he has a fresh take that plays up the character’s inter­nal strug­gle between emo­tion and logic. Chris Pine art­fully embod­ies Kirk’s blend of right­eous nobil­ity and brash rule-busting atti­tude with­out aping William Shatner’s famously hammy style (for which we all, admit it, love him). Karl Urban nails Bones as a sea­sick pes­simist, and Zoe Sal­dana and John Cho bring wel­come sass and phys­i­cal action hero prowess to Uhura and Sulu, two char­ac­ters often left on the side­lines. Only Anton Yelchin and Simon Pegg come close to over­do­ing it. Pegg mugs and shouts, play­ing Scotty as much more of a mad Scots­man than James Doohan ever did, and Yelchin overex­ag­ger­ates Chekov’s accent for pure com­edy. But that’s not to say both per­for­mances aren’t hugely enter­tain­ing, just like every­thing else on display.

Simon Pegg in Star TrekPegg gives Scotty’s accent all she’s got, Captain!

Star Trek goes much much fur­ther with Spock’s half-human nature than any of the Trek I’ve seen. Spock was such a key ingre­di­ent that almost every ver­sion of Trek that fol­lowed was oblig­ated to include a sim­i­lar char­ac­ter: most obvi­ously the android Data (Brent Spiner) in The Next Gen­er­a­tion. We are reminded the Vul­can species is not nat­u­rally emo­tion­less, as many casual fans assume, but rather a deeply pas­sion­ate peo­ple that holds its war­like nature in check by ele­vat­ing logic to the level of reli­gion. A purely devout Vul­can would be about as dra­mat­i­cally inter­est­ing as a robot (but it must be said that even Spock’s father Sarek (Ben Cross), a high-ranking Vul­can elder, pri­vately admits to being moved by the irra­tional emo­tion of love). The aged Spock Prime is prac­ti­cally jovial, seem­ingly hav­ing come to terms with his dual­ity. It’s actu­ally rather heart­warm­ing for a long­time fan to see him at a place of peace with himself.

I have room for one more small com­plaint: there’s an over­re­liance on clichéd father issues as easy story short­cuts to define char­ac­ter, for which I blame J.J. Abrams. Both Kirk and Spock are torn between rebelling against and own­ing up to their respec­tive heroic, accom­plished fathers. Abrams also built his TV series Alias and Lost upon the same dra­matic crutch, in which seem­ingly every char­ac­ter is pri­mar­ily moti­vated by strained rela­tion­ships with absent and/or bad fathers (e.g. Syd­ney, Jack, Locke, Kate, Miles, etc…). One won­ders, sta­tis­ti­cally speak­ing, how many peo­ple in the world actu­ally do have such com­pli­cated rela­tion­ships with their dads. Maybe those that do are just more likely to make their careers writ­ing scripts for Hollywood.

None of the many Trek sequels, pre­quels, or spin­offs to date have ever reached the mythic sta­tus of the orig­i­nal series and its core dynamic duo Kirk and Spock. Star Trek makes a bold bid to reclaim what made the orig­i­nal such a phe­nom­e­non: it goes back to the orig­i­nal sce­nario and char­ac­ters, and thor­oughly remas­ters, rein­vig­o­rates, rein­vents, and gives them a swift kick in the ass. It restores the names Kirk and Spock to the realm of leg­ends and icons.

Offi­cial movie site: www.startrekmovie.com

The Spirit

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The Spirit movie poster

 

At last, finally another entry to The Dork Report’s hal­lowed pan­theon of zero-star unholy cin­ema atroc­i­ties. Frank Miller’s The Spirit is far more than just merely bad. Like the most infa­mous movie dis­as­ter of all, Ed Wood’s Plan Nine From Outer Space (read The Dork Report appre­ci­a­tion), it veers wildly from stun­ning weird­ness to unin­ten­tional hilar­ity, inter­spersed with fre­quent stretches of insuf­fer­able bore­dom. But what truly lands The Spirit among the rar­i­fied com­pany of true cin­e­matic crimes against human­ity is that it is the insane and unhinged prod­uct of a uniquely obsessed auteur mind. The only dif­fer­ence is, Miller was handed a great deal more money and resources than Wood ever man­aged to wrangle.

Not that he didn’t have to work for it. Miller is one of the best-known (and most ripped-off) rock stars to grad­u­ate from the sweat­shop that is the comic book indus­try. He has writ­ten and/or illus­trated some of the best-selling and most influ­en­tial series of comics’ mod­ern age, includ­ing Wolver­ine, Dare­devil, Ronin, Elek­tra: Assas­sin, Sin City, and 300. Much of this work has long been ruth­lessly pil­laged for raw mate­r­ial for Hollywood’s lever­ag­ing of comic book intel­lec­tual prop­er­ties. The unmatched one-two punch of his 1980s Bat­man graphic nov­els Year One (with David Maz­zuc­chelli) and The Dark Knight, together with Alan Moore and Brian Bolland’s The Killing Joke, became the basis for Tim Burton’s Bat­man (1989). That first major comics-to-movie block­buster not only bor­rowed Miller’s par­tic­u­lar inter­pre­ta­tion of the char­ac­ter (itself a highly dis­tilled ver­sion of its sur­pris­ingly dark his­tory), but also his over­all visual style (going to far as to visu­ally quote indi­vid­ual panels).

Gabriel Macht in The Spirit“I’m gonna kill you all kinds of dead.”

Over a decade later, Mark Steven Johnson’s Dare­devil (2003) unfor­tu­nately fum­bled Miller’s most famous orig­i­nal char­ac­ter, the Greek ninja assas­sin Elek­tra. But Miller was soon to cease being merely some­one from whom Hol­ly­wood stole paid homage. In 2005, Miller jumped media bar­ri­ers to co-direct a fea­ture film adap­ta­tion of his orig­i­nal graphic novel Sin City with Robert Rodriguez. The two crafted an exact­ingly faith­ful recre­ation of the book, essen­tially treat­ing the orig­i­nal comics as sto­ry­boards. Miller’s pro­file only rose as Zack Sny­der pulled a sim­i­lar stunt with Miller’s 1998 graphic novel 300, pro­duc­ing an even big­ger (and slightly con­tro­ver­sial) smash hit.

Credit to Miller for absorb­ing count­less lessons from the sea­soned indie mav­er­ick Rodriguez, enough to helm an entire fea­ture on his own. The Spirit’s visu­als are often extra­or­di­nar­ily beau­ti­ful, exploit­ing the thin bar­rier between ani­ma­tion and live action blurred ever since the largely green-screened Star Wars: The Phan­tom Men­ace (George Lucas, 1999) and Sky Cap­tain and the World of Tomor­row (Kerry Con­ran, 2004). Like Sin City, nearly every shot is highly processed to effect a styl­ized evo­ca­tion of noir lit­er­a­ture and movies.

But together with Miller’s sig­na­ture brand of stark, chiaroscuro images and pur­ple, pulpy noir dia­logue, it doesn’t look or sound any­thing like the real osten­si­ble real source mate­r­ial, Will Eisner’s orig­i­nal Spirit comics. The leg­endary Eis­ner is con­sid­ered the inven­tor of the graphic novel. The DVD edi­tion includes a must-see bonus fea­ture: “Miller on Miller,” in which Miller talks of him as a teacher, and took many of his apho­risms as lessons, includ­ing the essen­tial sen­su­al­ity of ink­ing (which Miller took rather lit­er­ally). Eis­ner (and oth­ers such as Neal Adams) may have inspired Miller in the first place, but Miller’s ver­sion of The Spirit in Chucks and cape-like trench­coat more closely resem­bles his own cre­ations, espe­cially Dwight from Sin City (Clive Owen in the film) or Dare­devil as he appears in the 1990 graphic novel Elek­tra Lives Again.

This Dork Reporter read Miller’s comics as a kid, and cer­tainly never expected the guy would one day be a bank­able force in Hol­ly­wood. Look­ing back­wards, it’s plain he hasn’t changed much. His obses­sions and pre­oc­cu­pa­tions are now only ampli­fied and enhanced: his mod­ern comics (and now movies) are mostly com­prised of homo­erotic bone-crunching acro­batic fights (if the entirety of 300 isn’t proof enough, might I refer you to Daredevil’s bat­tle with the naked, big-dicked Bulls­eye in Elek­tra Lives Again), volup­tuous femmes fatale (no skinny waifs for him), and pulp fic­tion and film noir-inspired odes to his beloved New York City. Also on the DVD, Miller expounds on all his favorite talk­ing points, from his detailed knowl­edge of comics his­tory, his love for New York City, and his hatred of cen­sor­ship (he’s famously prone to cas­ti­gate the comics indus­try for weakly cen­sor­ing itself instead of fight­ing back against — or even ignor­ing — Con­gres­sional pres­sure in the 1950s).

Scarlett Johansson in The Spirit“I’ve known some pretty strange women in my time but this one, she’s got the final word on strange.”

I’m not famil­iar with Eisner’s orig­i­nal Spirit comics, which appeared as inserts in 1940s Sun­day news­pa­pers. But from what I under­stand, Miller took a great deal of lib­er­ties beyond jet­ti­son­ing Eisner’s col­or­ful visual style in favor of his own Sin City look. Miller adds a meta­phys­i­cal aspect miss­ing in the orig­i­nal, mak­ing The Spirit and his neme­sis The Octo­pus both inde­struc­tible and quick-healing (per­haps inspired by the char­ac­ter Wolver­ine, to which Miller had a hand in pop­u­lar­iz­ing in the early 1980s). The pres­ence of Samuel L. Jack­son can’t help but rec­ol­lect M. Night Shyamalan’s Unbreak­able, an infi­nitely more sub­tle exam­i­na­tion of the super­hero archetype.

The action is set in an unnamed fan­tasy urban land­scape like that of Alex Proyas’ Dark City (1998) and David Fincher’s Se7en (1995): filthy, sur­rounded by water, soaked by con­stant pre­cip­i­ta­tion and fog, and in per­pet­ual night until the sun finally rises at the end. Miller’s script con­spic­u­ously avoids men­tion­ing the year, but the auto­mo­biles and fash­ions are clearly of the 1940s while the char­ac­ters employ the cell phones and inter­net of the 2000s. This is Miller’s home.

The Spirit sports an unusu­ally eclec­tic cast, with the unknown Gabriel Macht in the epony­mous role with much better-known stars Jack­son and Scar­lett Johans­son in sup­port­ing roles. The per­for­mances range from the dis­tracted (Sarah Paul­son as a good girl besot­ted with The Spirit) to the bor­der­line lunatic (hi, Sam!). One can hardly blame the actors, for surely they were at the mercy of the screen­play and Miller’s rookie coach­ing. Stana Katic is enter­tain­ing as Mor­gen­stern, a gosh-golly gee-whiz rookie cop that goose-steps from scene to scene like a sexy robot. ScarJo rocks horn­rimmed glasses like no bad girl before her, but it’s just plain uncom­fort­able to see her in Nazi fetish­wear and jackboots.

The Octo­pus is a mad sci­en­tist con­duct­ing all sorts of med­ical atroc­i­ties in the name of mutat­ing him­self to god­like pow­ers. He deems one of his mis­fired exper­i­ments as “just plain damn weird,” a phrase apro­pos of the movie itself. It’s oddly slap­stick, and often out­right silly. Unex­pect­edly, it’s much less vio­lent, or rather, gory, than 300 or Sin City. It’s also slightly more play­ful in nar­ra­tive terms; the Spirit’s noirish voiceover often brazenly breaks the fourth wall by speak­ing directly to the camera.

And finally, some trivia gleaned from the credits:

  • This comic geek thought I rec­og­nized a con­tri­bu­tion by fre­quent col­lab­o­ra­tor Geof Dar­row (Hard Boiled and Big Guy & Rusty the Boy Robot), and I was proved cor­rect in the end credits.
  • The end cred­its them­selves, designed by Miller, are stunning.
  • Miller is also cred­ited for the sto­ry­boards, which must be some­thing to see.
  • Miller cameos as a decapi­ti­ated cop, the head of whom The Octo­pus wields as a weapon. He also appears in Sin City, Dare­devil and Robo­Cop 2, for which he wrote the screenplay.

Offi­cial movie site: www.mycityscreams.com

Buy the DVD and the book The Spirit: The Movie Visual Com­pan­ion from Ama­zon and kick back a few pen­nies to The Dork Report.

Battlestar Galactica: Caprica

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Battlestar Galactica Caprica poster

 

UPDATE: Read our revised and expanded review of the Caprica pilot, writ­ten after the pilot aired on television.

The recently con­cluded series Bat­tlestar Galac­tica (2003–2009) was crit­i­cally acclaimed and much beloved by a rel­a­tively small group of fans and crit­ics that appre­ci­ated the sexy, brainy show’s bleak, pes­simistic view of human­ity. It will cer­tainly live for­ever as a clas­sic achieve­ment in tele­vi­sion, but the com­mon con­sen­sus is that it failed to reach the wide audi­ence it could have. Exec­u­tive Pro­ducer Ron Moore told Vari­ety “‘We had view­ers say that if they were able to trick their wives or girl­friends into watch­ing Galac­tica, they loved it. But with the name Bat­tlestar Galac­tica scream­ing sci­ence fic­tion,’ he adds, ‘there was just such a high hur­dle to get female view­ers to even try it.’” So comes Caprica, a pre­quel osten­si­bly engi­neered from the begin­ning for greater appeal.

The series proper will not air until early 2010, but in an orig­i­nal move, its unrated (read: blood ‘n’ boo­bies) movie-length pilot episode pre­miered day-and-date on DVD and dig­i­tal down­load. It pre­serves some of the sig­na­ture ver­nac­u­lar of its par­ent series: tech­nob­a­b­ble like “Cylon” (Cyber­netic Life­form Node), the trip-on-the-tongue “gods damn it,” the infa­mous euphemism “frak,” and even racial epi­thets like “dirt eater.” The char­ac­ter of Bill Adama (Edward James Olmos in Bat­tlestar Galac­tica) appears as a young boy. Some of the same core themes are still present, par­tic­u­larly reli­gious intol­er­ance and fam­i­lies cop­ing with cat­a­strophic dis­as­ter. But there are sig­nif­i­cantly wor­ri­some signs that indi­cate a fatal mis­cal­cu­la­tion on The SyFy Channel’s part (worse than their aston­ish­ingly stu­pid rechris­ten­ing from “Sci-Fi”): Caprica hinges on two men and three annoy­ing teens, rel­e­gat­ing its only two adult female char­ac­ters to the sidelines.

Eric Stoltz and Esai Morales in Battlestar Galactica CapricaCaprica, like Bat­tlestar Galac­tica, holds that there are no Sur­geon Gen­eral warn­ings in space

It may very well be the case that many women were dis­cour­aged from check­ing Bat­tlestar Galac­tica out, but it’s also true that the show fea­tured a bevy of sig­nif­i­cant, com­plex women: self-destructive fire­brand Star­buck (Katee Sack­hoff), pres­i­dent of all human­ity Laura Roslin (Mary McDon­nell), Dick Cheney-esque war crim­i­nal Cap­tain Cain (Michelle Forbes), and con­flicted Cylons Three (Lucy Law­less), Six (Tri­cia Helfer), and Eight (Grace Park). So far, at least, Caprica includes only two lead female roles, nei­ther of whom fig­ures strongly in the plot: Amanda Gray­stone (Paula Mal­com­son, from Dead­wood) and Sis­ter Clarice Wil­low (Polly Walker, from Rome). But maybe this makes a kind of sense. The core dynamic is clas­sic sto­ry­telling: indus­tri­al­ist Daniel Gray­stone (Eric Stoltz) and lawyer Joseph Adama (Esai Morales) become entan­gled in a plot, while com­ing from oppos­ing philo­soph­i­cal points of view. If one of them had been female, the viewer might nat­u­rally expect a roman­tic sub­plot. Caprica’s cre­ators may have avoided this kind of dis­trac­tion, but the down­side is that the pri­mary nar­ra­tive con­flict is between two men, and the only two female char­ac­ters are solely defined by their rela­tion­ships to their men and kids. Daniel and Amanda’s daugh­ter Zoe (Alessan­dra Tores­sani) is killed in a ter­ror­ist attack, but we never see the icy Amanda mourn as we do Daniel. Her char­ac­ter is sim­ply Daniel’s wife, noth­ing more. Sis­ter Wil­low, at least, is revealed by the end to be more than she seems. Here’s hop­ing we see Amanda and Sis­ter Wil­low sig­nif­i­cantly expanded in future episodes.

Another thing Bat­tlestar Galac­tica got right was to side­step alto­gether the trap of child char­ac­ters. It was an adult show, for intel­li­gent adults. Caprica obvi­ously also didn’t learn from a les­son from Jeri­cho (2006–2008), a gen­er­ally smart show whose weak­est char­ac­ters were a pair of teens that were thank­fully writ­ten out. Out of Caprica’s trio of incred­i­bly annoy­ing kids, at least two die but unfor­tu­nately come back.

Eric Stoltz, Paula Malcomson, and Esai Morales in Battlestar Galactica CapricaWait, there was a woman in Caprica? Let’s hope poor Paula Mal­com­son actu­ally gets some scenes in the full series

The first 10 min­utes pack in a huge down­load of infor­ma­tion, espe­cially for some­one not already versed in the fic­tional Galac­tica uni­verse. Cer­tain key points are reit­er­ated once things slow down later, but a new viewer tun­ing in cold might get the sense they were sup­posed to be versed in all this stuff already, instead of just get­ting teased with a bar­rage of info to be unpacked later. When a title card reads “58 years before The Fall,” Galac­tica fans will catch the ref­er­ence to the sneak attack by the Cylons that nearly erad­i­cates their human creators.

We then cut directly to the deca­dent V Club, imply­ing its late-Rome-like deca­dence to be one of the direct causes of the com­ing Fall. A fully immer­sive vir­tual real­ity sim­u­la­tion not unlike The Matrix, the V Club is full of teens danc­ing to dated techno, hot les­bians, sim­u­lated human sac­ri­fice, and a fight club. Its banal­ity betrays a fail­ure of imag­i­na­tion not just on the part of Caprica’s teens, but also on the film­mak­ers. A rebel­lious gen­er­a­tion cre­ates a vir­tual world in which they can do absolutely any­thing they want, and all they can come up with is a sin­gle night­club that only spins techno from Earth’s 1990s? No gay boys want to make out? Nobody wants to fly? Nobody wants a body made of jade?

The tit­u­lar Caprica is the cap­i­tal of twelve plan­ets col­o­nized by human­ity. We only caught glimpses of its future on Bat­tlestar Galac­tica, so there is plenty of unex­plored ter­ri­tory for a new series to fill in. Its fash­ions resem­ble 1950s Amer­ica, per­haps meant to cap­i­tal­ize on the pop­u­lar­ity of the Show­time series Mad Men. We’re sup­posed to agree that Caprica is a cor­rupt, deca­dent soci­ety on the cusp of col­lapse. But how, exactly? They’re play­ing god(s) by delv­ing into dan­ger­ous tech­no­log­i­cal areas like robotic weapons and arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence, or at least a means of record­ing a human individual’s con­scious­ness into a com­puter. They’ve designed vir­tual real­ity sys­tems capa­ble of sim­u­lat­ing any desire. The soci­ety is racist to the core; Tau­rans (from the colony Tau­rus) are called “dirt eaters” and asso­ci­ated with orga­nized crime (although to be fair, the lat­ter actu­ally is true — they seem sim­i­lar to the immi­grant Sicil­ian mafia in 1920s Amer­ica). Like Michael Cor­leone in the God­fa­ther tril­ogy, Joseph is osten­si­bly an upstand­ing cit­i­zen forced to com­pro­mise with his her­itage. Unable to com­pletely extri­cate him­self from the mob, he tries to raise his son as a Capri­can, to the con­ster­na­tion of his grandmother.

Alessandra Toressani in Battlestar Galactica CapricaZoe, genius hacker, goes club­bing in The Matrix

This society’s most dan­ger­ous trait is its ingrained reli­gious intol­er­ance. The pop­u­la­tion is almost uni­formly poly­the­is­tic, and intol­er­ant of the minor­ity monothe­ists. Under­ground mil­i­tants have formed the Sol­diers of the One, a cult that believes in a com­bi­na­tion of monothe­ism and anti-science. Their rep­re­sen­ta­tive Sis­ter Wil­low manip­u­lates ter­ror­ist tot Ben (Avan Jogia) to stage a bombing.

The biggest addi­tion to the Bat­tlestar Galac­tica mythos is a deeper look into arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence. Like the Ter­mi­na­tor fran­chise, I appre­ci­ate Caprica’s empha­sis that devel­op­ing arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence is a sep­a­rate pur­suit than build­ing robots. Too many sci­ence fic­tion sto­ries seem to equate the two, includ­ing Bat­tlestar Galac­tica itself in its final episode. The Day the Earth Stood Still and For­bid­den Planet’s humanoid robots have minds of its own, but what about being robots makes them so, as opposed to immo­bile com­put­ers? Blade Runner’s repli­cants and A.I.‘s boy robots look human first, and it is never asked what exactly makes them sen­tient beings (unless the ques­tion is how we anthro­po­mor­phize things that out­wardly seem human). Arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence is almost always auto­mat­i­cally evil in movies such as Ter­mi­na­tor and 2001: A Space Odyssey. It is rarely inher­ently inno­cent, as in A.I.: Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence. Caprica fea­tures two dis­turb­ing scenes of a human con­scious­ness wak­ing up trapped in a crude robot body. That’s called overeg­ging your pud­ding. Also creepy: the advances made by Zoe lead directly to Daniel’s clumsy war­rior robots becom­ing the effec­tive killing machines chris­tened Cylons.

Speak­ing of, how could a lumi­nary in the robot­ics busi­ness not know his own daugh­ter was a genius hacker? A par­tic­u­larly hard-to-swallow bit of tech­nob­a­b­ble is the repeated sta­tis­tic that the amount of data encoded in a human brain com­prises only 300 megabytes. Appar­ently work­ing on her own, Zoe comes up with the solu­tion to pre­serv­ing a human mind in a com­puter: sup­ple­ment that 300 MB of data with the dig­i­tal detri­tus that per­son has left behind: med­ical records, playlists, email, searches, etc. Her break­through allows Daniel to res­ur­rect Joseph’s late daugh­ter as well (although we don’t see how he obtained her 300 MB worth of brain mat­ter). The resul­tant dupli­cate quickly goes insane, so Zoe is some­how spe­cial, the only dig­i­tal human mind that doesn’t go mad.

Some awfully big events are revealed in the DVD edition’s deleted scenes: Adama learns early on that Zoe was involved in the bomb­ing, adding an extra dimen­sion to his inter­ac­tions with her father. Also, boy bomber Ben’s mind was also suc­cess­fully uploaded into the V Club by Sis­ter Wil­low, sug­gest­ing that Zoe might not be so unique after all, and that her sci­en­tic break­throughs may have been in part devel­oped by the Sol­diers of the One. Both of these strike me as great lay­ers of com­plex­ity that would have only added to the story.

Offi­cial movie site: www.scifi.com/caprica

Buy the DVD from Ama­zon and kick back a few pen­nies to The Dork Report.

Quarantine

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Quarantine movie poster

 

Quar­an­tine, remade by direc­tor John Erick Dow­dle (co-written with brother Drew) from the Span­ish movie REC (2007), fol­lows in the now-firmly estab­lished hor­ror faux­men­tary tra­di­tion. Pre­vi­ous entries Blair Witch Project, Diary of the Dead, and Clover­field are all osten­si­bly com­prised of found footage recov­ered from cam­eras found at the scenes of hor­rific dis­as­ters. Quarantine’s only wrin­kle is that, unlike its pre­de­ces­sors, this pre­tense is not explained as such on screen. Quarantine’s con­ceit is that we’re watch­ing raw footage, edited in-camera, aban­doned by the late char­ac­ters them­selves. There are no implied, unseen sur­vivors that picked up the pieces.

Clover­field (read The Dork Report review) never pro­vided a con­vinc­ing psy­cho­log­i­cal moti­va­tion to explain why its cin­e­matog­ra­pher would keep his cam­corder run­ning through­out his des­per­ate flight from toxic alien crea­tures swarm­ing across Man­hat­tan. A much more intel­li­gent exam­i­na­tion of an obses­sion to cap­ture every­thing on video came from the less expected source of none other than the zom­bie god­fa­ther him­self, George A. Romero. His under­rated Diary of the Dead (read The Dork Report review) fea­tures a group of young film stu­dents with pre­ten­sions to becom­ing great doc­u­men­tar­ian film­mak­ers, and what bet­ter sub­ject to doc­u­ment than their own first-hand expe­ri­ences dur­ing a zom­bie out­break? Although Clover­field had sig­nif­i­cantly greater bud­getary resources at its dis­posal to cre­ate eerily real­is­tic images of Man­hat­tan crum­bling beneath the feet of a Godzilla-like mon­ster, Quar­an­tine fol­lows in the more mod­est foot­steps of Diary of the Dead in striv­ing for greater psy­cho­log­i­cal realism.

Scott Percival in Quarantineground floor, com­ing up

In story terms, the jus­ti­fi­ca­tions for Quarantine’s char­ac­ters to keep film­ing con­tin­u­ally evolve as their cir­cum­stances worsen. Like Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (read The Dork Report review), Quar­an­tine fea­tures mem­bers of the press as main char­ac­ters. The first full 12 min­utes are devoted to reporter Angela Vidal (Jen­nifer Car­pen­ter) and cam­era­man Scott Per­ci­val (Steve Har­ris) shoot­ing a tele­vi­sion news seg­ment on a local fire depart­ment. By the time an emer­gency finally arrives and the duo hitches a ride along to the scene, we’ve become fully endeared to the bub­bly, spunky reporter and the charm­ingly filthy fire­fight­ers. As the rou­tine inves­ti­ga­tion turns into a con­fronta­tion with a feral-seeming elderly woman, Angela senses the oppor­tu­nity to score some sen­sa­tional footage. It’s clear she fan­cies her­self a more seri­ous reporter.

Later, as the elderly woman is revealed to be patient zero for a new highly con­ta­gious dis­ease, the Los Ange­les Cen­ter for Com­mu­ni­ca­ble Dis­ease quickly quar­an­tines the build­ing, cut­ting off all their com­mu­ni­ca­tions and falsely report­ing to the pub­lic that it has been evac­u­ated. The trapped ten­ants are a ran­dom assort­ment of Los Ange­lans: an opera tutor and his hot young live-in pro­tégé, a vet­eri­nar­ian, a clean­ing woman, a mom and her baby (whom we meet again near the end of the film, in hor­ri­fy­ing trans­formed fash­ion), toy dogs, an immi­grant cou­ple, and… what’s miss­ing? That’s right! If this is L.A., where are all the unem­ployed actors?

Build­ing man­ager Yuri (Rade Serbedz­ija) keeps con­ve­niently remem­ber­ing exits (includ­ing a back door and a base­ment entry to a sewer), but all are blocked. By this point, Angela has mor­phed into a right­eous cru­sader want­ing more footage as proof of the city’s out­rage against jus­tice and human rights. But when the virus spreads to most of the peo­ple trapped in the build­ing, the power goes off, and panic truly sets in, Angela’s moti­va­tions switch to pure sur­vival. The cam­era now only proves use­ful as a source of light, and any­thing cap­tured on video hap­pens by chance as they fran­ti­cally nav­i­gate through the cor­ri­dors. Then, in true hor­ror movie fash­ion, things get even worse. In a scene rival­ing the nail-biting base­ment sequence in Silence of the Lambs, Angela and Scott find them­selves bar­ri­caded in a pitch-black attic with their camera’s lamp bro­ken. The remain­der of the movie is seen through the green­ish haze of their night-vision filter.

Jennifer Carpenter in QuarantineIn true hor­ror movie fash­ion, Angela (Jen­nifer Car­pen­ter) sheds lay­ers of cloth­ing through­out her ordeal

While Quar­an­tine may seem to tip its hat to hor­ror tra­di­tion as pro­tag­o­nist Angela sheds lay­ers of cloth­ing over the course of her ordeal, the movie is actu­ally quite sub­ver­sive in show­ing her lose her spirit. Atyp­i­cally for a hor­ror movie pro­tag­o­nist, she is no plucky sur­vivor that defeats the men­ace. She pretty much just breaks down.

Quar­an­tine may be yet another in a long line of zom­bie flicks, but I would argue its true genre iden­tity is as an urban night­mare. Clover­field relived 9/11 in the form of another Godzilla and its highly toxic babies, and Guillermo Del Toro’s Mimic envi­sioned swarms of giant cock­roaches breed­ing in aban­doned sub­way sta­tions. Quar­an­tine touches on another deep anx­i­ety of urban dwellers: a viral con­ta­gion born of city filth. The entire out­break plays out in the con­fines of an aging ten­e­ment build­ing (with what seems to be a cloth­ing sweat­shop hid­den in the back), a place many city slick­ers might rec­og­nize as home.

What made Quar­an­tine the most fright­en­ing for me in par­tic­u­lar was not the gore or the booga-booga scare fac­tor, but rather the dis­turb­ing plau­si­bil­ity of its fic­tional dis­ease. In real­ity, all we hear about are the dan­gers of dis­eases like HIV jump­ing from bush­meat to humans, and the avian or swine flu incu­bat­ing in impov­er­ished nations where peo­ple live in close quar­ters with ani­mals. What about those of us liv­ing in devel­oped, sup­pos­edly civ­i­lized cites, full of dogs, roaches, rats, and yes, a cer­tain num­ber of crazy nutjobs?

A hyper-evolved form of the rabies virus is the most plau­si­ble pseudo-scientific expla­na­tion I’ve yet heard for zom­bies, espe­cially com­pared to the vaguely described Venu­sian radi­a­tion in Romero’s Night of the Liv­ing Dead (read The Dork Report review). Like the “super­flu” in Stephen King’s The Stand and the dis­tilled “rage” virus in Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later, this strain of rabies was genet­i­cally engi­neered by a lone ter­ror­ist holed up in the attic of the ten­e­ment. An omi­nous clue is dropped halfway through the film about an unaccounted-for ten­ant liv­ing in the attic. When we finally meet him, he appears to have been infected for quite some time. Blind and ema­ci­ated, he scram­bles around in the total dark­ness of his for­mer home and lab­o­ra­tory (scat­tered with dis­gust­ing med­ical pho­tos and news­pa­per clip­pings about Dooms­day Cults). The creepy fig­ure is played by the unusu­ally tall and slen­der Doug Jones, most recently seen as the Sil­ver Surfer in Fan­tas­tic Four and Abe Sapien in Hell­boy. I worked on the offi­cial web­site for Guillermo Del Toro’s mar­velous Pan’s Labyrinth, for which Jones was inter­viewed about his expe­ri­ences play­ing The Faun and The Pale Man; for some­one that so typ­i­cally plays mon­sters, he’s a super-nice, funny, and charm­ing dude. I skimmed through the bonus fea­tures on the Quar­an­tine DVD, and it’s a cry­ing shame that he appar­ently wasn’t interviewed.

In place of a musi­cal score, Quar­an­tine fea­tures a com­plex sound design built around an eerily creak­ing, groan­ing old build­ing. It also for­goes other stan­dard movie plea­sures, being a grue­some, depress­ing, and pun­ish­ing expe­ri­ence. In that respect, it’s sim­i­lar to how the nau­se­at­ingly (lit­er­ally) bleak Blind­ness (read The Dork Report review). In con­trast, the sub­lime Chil­dren of Men (read The Dork Report review) is the rare movie night­mare set at the brink of the end of human­ity that nev­er­the­less car­ries a spark of uplift and hope.

Offi­cial movie site: www.ContainTheTruth.com

Buy the DVD from Ama­zon and kick back a few pen­nies to The Dork Report.

Los Cronocrímenes (Timecrimes)

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Los Cronocrímenes Timecrimes movie poster

 

A grotesquely cos­tumed, knife-wielding creep on the Time­crimes (Los Cronocrímenes) the­atri­cal poster promises an exploita­tive slasher pic along the lines of Texas Chain­saw Mas­sacre. To some degree, con­sid­er­ing the degra­da­tions made upon a breath­tak­ingly beau­ti­ful girl alone in the woods, it is. But Nacho Vigalondo’s Span­ish sci­ence fic­tion puz­zler is a friend­lier sib­ling to Shane Carruth’s Primer (2004), a much more brain-spraining chrono­log­i­cal conun­drum. Both are rare sci­ence fic­tions that rely on a com­plex­ity of ideas rather than spe­cial effect eye candy. Vigalondo’s dif­fer­ent take on the sci-fi tropes of time travel (more on that later) makes Time­crimes a lit­tle eas­ier to follow.

The film opens with Héc­tor (Karra Ele­jalde) dri­ving home from gro­cery shop­ping with the hatch­back of his car ajar, leav­ing a string of gro­ceries behind him (yes, it’s a metaphor). He and his wife Clara (Can­dela Fer­nán­dez) are out­fit­ting a coun­try home as a retreat for the stressed-out insom­niac. We never learn what exactly ails him, or what kind of job affords them such a lifestyle. Lit­tle do we real­ize that vio­lence and chaos is already roil­ing in the bucolic woods around them. Their neigh­bor turns out to be a research insti­tute devel­op­ing a rudi­men­tary time machine. The device is not due to be tested for weeks, but unnamed staffer El Joven (Viga­londo him­self), is hang­ing around the facil­ity to tin­ker with it with­out permission.

Karra Elejalde in TimecrimesTime­crimes’ pink boogieman

Héc­tor encoun­ters an uncon­scious nude woman (Bár­bara Goe­naga) in the woods, and finds him­self pur­sued by what he assumes to be her assailant. Tak­ing refuge at the insti­tute, El Joven vol­un­teers to hide him in an appa­ra­tus that resem­bles a hot tub pre­pared for a milk bath. From Hector’s point of view, the doors open mere moments later, but he finds him­self sev­eral hours in the past. Even though Héc­tor is the first per­son to ever travel through time, El Joven seems pretty una­mazed that the machine works. He’s also assured of the rules: Héc­tor must be sure to stay out of the way as his future self comes to the time machine, after which there will once again only be one Hec­tor in the world. Meet­ing him­self and/or alter­ing events (say, pre­vent­ing his future self from ever pass­ing back to the past), would cause a cat­a­clysmic paradox.

El Joven never spec­i­fies what exactly the results would be, but any­one famil­iar with Doc­tor Who, Star Trek, and the afore­men­tioned Primer would know that a tem­po­ral para­dox could rup­ture the space time con­tin­uüm, reverse the polar­ity of the neu­tron flow, be really socially awk­ward, or… what­ever. More illus­tra­tive is the para­dox at the heart of the Ter­mi­na­tor films: the evil arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence SkyNet sends a cyborg back in time to kill Sarah Con­nor, before she becomes the mother of SkyNet’s mor­tal enemy John Con­nor. Future-John also sends his best friend Kyle Reese back in time, osten­si­bly to pro­tect his mother. As David Fos­ter Wal­lace pointed out in his vicious cri­tique of Ter­mi­na­tor 2: Judege­ment Day, the para­dox is that both time trav­el­ers cause the unwanted future to occur: Reese sleeps with Sarah and becomes John’s father, and the wreck­age of the cyborg becomes the tech­no­log­i­cal basis for build­ing SkyNet.

Nacho Vigalondo in Timecrimesdirec­tor Nacho Viga­londo appar­ently wrote his pitch meet­ing into his script

Héc­tor orig­i­nally acts impul­sively and attempts to con­tact his past self by phone, and then in per­son. He makes a series of calami­tous errors, and even­tu­ally comes to real­ize that he must shift his strat­egy to ensure he not dis­rupt what has already hap­pened to him, but will be every­body else’s future. El Joven only sticks Hec­tor into the time machine in the first place because a copy of him that already went through told El Joven he had to do it. Hec­tor kid­naps and abuses La Chica to recre­ate the per­verse sce­nario the past ver­sion of him­self encoun­tered. He com­mits a per­verse crime against her, but not for his plea­sure (to any­one not aware of his predica­ment, his behav­ior is psychotic).

But the increas­ingly crazed Héc­tor tries one last time to change events. He trav­els back in time again, cre­at­ing a sec­ond tem­po­ral loop-de-loop, a third dupli­cate of him­self, and more pro­lif­er­at­ing walkie-talkies than I was able to keep track of. Héc­tor only seems to real­ize near the end of his ordeal that every­thing is click­ing into a pre­de­ter­mined sequence of events, regard­less of his direct or indi­rect inter­fer­ence. Even­tu­ally, a calm­ness comes over him, and he sim­ply sits down and waits for events to fin­ish play­ing them­selves out, know­ing there is noth­ing he can do. So Time­crimes’ notion of time travel is not actu­ally like that in Star Trek or Ter­mi­na­tor, but more like the tele­vi­sion show Lost, whose rules stip­u­late that there is only one unal­ter­able time­line. There is no such thing as a paradox.

Karra Elejalde and Bárbara Goenaga in TimecrimesLa Chica unknow­ingly helps Héc­tor out of two dif­fer­ent car crashes

Héctor’s time loops are straight­ened out by the end, with only one ver­sion of him­self left in the world. But his mis­ad­ven­tures in time have left a trail of destruc­tion behind him sim­i­lar to his spilled gro­ceries in the begin­ning of the film. La Chica lies dead in his gar­den, he’s crashed two cars, and the police are com­ing. La Chica’s neck­lace is in his pocket, and he’s sure to be found guilty for her death. Per­haps worse of all, a work­ing time machine site idle at the top of the hill, wait­ing for more mis­takes to be made.

The DVD also includes Vigalondo’s excel­lent short film 7:35 de la Mañana (7:35 AM), in which he exhibits his prowess with the slow reveal of nar­ra­tive information.

Offi­cial movie site: www.loscronocrimenes.com

Buy the DVD from Ama­zon and kick back a few pen­nies to The Dork Report.

Religulous

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Religulous movie poster

 

Standup come­dian and occa­sional b-movie star Bill Maher remade him­self into a satir­i­cal polit­i­cal pun­dit on the cable TV shows Polit­i­cally Incor­rect and Real Time. He most famously spoke truth to power when he defied the con­ven­tional wis­dom after 9/11 and cor­rectly stated that one thing the per­pe­tra­tors were not were cow­ards. Not sur­pris­ingly, he was swiftly fired by Com­edy Cen­tral. Had he stopped there, his arguable legacy would have been to blaze the trail for the likes of Jon Stew­art and Stephen Col­bert to crossover from the gut­ter of com­edy to main­stream polit­i­cal pun­ditry. Maher’s peer Al Franken went even fur­ther, from heck­ler to actual polit­i­cal participant.

But Maher was not con­tent to stop there. His lat­est incar­na­tion is, for bet­ter or worse, the pop­u­lar face of a grow­ing move­ment against orga­nized reli­gion. Unlike the ratio­nal sci­en­tist Richard Dawkins (mostly ratio­nal, that is; his recent state­ments against children’s fan­tasy lit­er­a­ture like Harry Pot­ter reveal him to be at best a killjoy and at worst a cen­sor) and the even more stri­dent Christo­pher Hitchens, Maher uses com­edy and out­right mock­ery to advance the cause of athe­ism in the some­times dis­turbingly theo­cratic Amer­i­can soci­ety. This Dork Reporter is on his side, but isn’t sure Maher and his movie Religu­lous is really what athe­ists need to com­bat the encroach­ment of church upon state. As Michael Moore is to lib­er­als, so too may Maher be to athe­ists every­where: is he really the best spokesperson?

Bill Maher in ReligulousA Jew and a talk show host walk into a bar… oh, you’ve heard this one?

Religu­lous teams Maher with direc­tor Larry Charles, also respon­si­ble for the high-concept low art Borat: Cul­tural Learn­ings of Amer­ica for Make Ben­e­fit Glo­ri­ous Nation of Kaza­khstan (2006) and Brüno (2009). While Borat and Bruno fall on the faux­men­tary end of the con­tin­uüm, Religu­lous skirts with being an actual doc­u­men­tary but stops short of pre­ten­sions to impar­tial­ity. Maher and Charles talk their way into enemy ter­ri­tory like the Holy Land Expe­ri­ence theme park in Orlando, the Cre­ation Museum in Ken­tucky (a tem­ple to the denial of basic sci­ence that would be hilar­i­ous were it not such an astound­ing cel­e­bra­tion of will­ful igno­rance), and the Truck­ers’ Chapel in Raleigh. Maher and Charles may have used sub­terfuge to gain access, but the fin­ished film is open about their decep­tion. The film­mak­ers openly brag over such stunts by proudly includ­ing footage of the Holy Land Experience’s pub­li­cist freak­ing out at the pres­ence of a bunch of god­less lib­er­als armed with a cam­era. All of this atti­tude is actu­ally not nec­es­sary; the film is at its best when Maher allows his inter­vie­wees to sim­ply talk their way into deep graves (which most of these intol­er­ant igno­ra­muses do with great gusto).

My biggest issue with the movie is its use of satir­i­cal edi­to­r­ial jux­ta­po­si­tion that on at least one occa­sion is out­right racist. I agree it’s fun to snicker at clips of cheesy old bib­li­cal movies, easy to mock the nau­se­at­ingly con­fused “for­mer homo­sex­ual” Pas­tor John Wescott of Exchange Min­istries with snip­pets of gay porn, and chuckle at the bald scam being run by José Luis de Jesús Miranda, a Puerto Rican claim­ing to be the direct descen­dent of Jesus Christ. But Maher refers to African Amer­i­can preacher Pas­tor Jere­miah Cum­mings’ gold jew­elry as “bling” and inter­cuts footage of a com­i­cally stereo­typ­i­cal pimp. Wescott is obvi­ously in deep denial, and Cum­mings and Miranda are despi­ca­ble crooks out for noth­ing but their own profit, but such cheap­shots are uncalled for.

Bill Maher in ReligulousAnd on the third day, Jesus went to Orlando

In the midst of all this fer­vent mad­ness, it’s some­what sur­pris­ing that the Catholic Church and even the Vat­i­can itself come across as the most enlight­ened. Maher is kicked out of the Vat­i­can proper, but meets with the supremely sane and ratio­nal Father George Coyne, head of the Vat­i­can obser­va­tory. Coyne is one man of the cloth, at least, that does not deny sci­ence or cel­e­brate igno­rance. Maher also strikes inter­view gold with the hilar­i­ously out­spo­ken for­mer Vat­i­can scholar Father Regi­nald Foster.

The plot thick­ens! Maher does not actu­ally self-identify as an athe­ist. As he told The Onion’s A.V. Club,

I’m not an athe­ist. There’s a really big dif­fer­ence between an athe­ist and some­one who just doesn’t believe in reli­gion. Reli­gion to me is a bureau­cracy between man and God that I don’t need. But I’m not an athe­ist, no. I believe there’s some force. If you want to call it God… I don’t believe God is a sin­gle par­ent who writes books.

Whether Maher posi­tions him­self as an athe­ist or merely a cru­sader against oppres­sive orga­nized reli­gion, he takes a kind of glee­ful pride in it. Smug athe­ists can be just as insuf­fer­able as holier-than-thou the­ists. Even before becom­ing a self-appointed voice against reli­gion, Maher had become some­what infa­mous for louche behav­ior (dat­ing and some­times mar­ry­ing strip­pers, fre­quent­ing the Play­boy Man­sion, etc.). His out­spo­ken opin­ions and tabloid-ready behav­ior prob­a­bly don’t help the­ists take him seri­ously. I imag­ine most fun­da­men­tal­ists pic­ture athe­ists as being like Maher: proud, con­de­scend­ing, and shirk­ing of the respon­si­bil­ity of religious-derived morals (in other words, not hav­ing hell to moti­vate them to not sin). What I think believ­ers need to under­stand is many peo­ple arrive at athe­ism only after pro­tracted peri­ods of dif­fi­cult soul search­ing, and aren’t nec­es­sar­ily smug about it.

Religu­lous may be preach­ing to the con­verted, but it can’t ever hurt to keep the pres­sure on those that would oppress and exploit oth­ers by claim­ing to have the ear of God.

Offi­cial movie site: www.religulousmovie.net

Buy the DVD from Ama­zon and kick back a few pen­nies to The Dork Report.