If Charles Darwin were right, a movie as half-witted as Expelled would never have evolved — QED
There’s a certain novelty in the idea of Ben Stein hosting a movie championing creationism. Stein, a university professor turned character actor (of Ferris Bueller fame), seems an unlikely guy to make the kind of movie that promotes intelligent design, a pseudo-scientific theory that posits a powerful being had a hand in creating life on Earth.
The novelty wears off pretty quickly. Rather than making a scientific case for intelligent design, the film follows Stein as he interviews a bunch of talking heads who poke holes in Darwinism while offering no credible alternatives. The movie starts out with Stein trying to expose universities and other academic institutions for ruining the careers of professors and researchers who questioned the theory of evolution. After the first 20 minutes, he moves on to criticize the theory itself, arguing that it doesn’t explain how the basic chemistry of life can come about without the hand of a creator. He soon steers the movie into shakier territory by blaming the theory for pushing humanity closer to atheism. Borrowing a page from Michael Moore, Stein peppers the film with cartoons and humour. The technique runs dry by the end of the movie, when he visits a concentration camp and asserts that the theory of evolution partly inspired the Holocaust.
Let’s forgive the film its faulty logic and unusual conclusions — it’s a bit redundant to pick them apart — and examine the movie on the quality of its craftsmanship. The best documentarians realize that a movie has to tell a story. Expelled misses the boat here. We meet several scientists who claim to have been kicked out of academia for teaching intelligent design, but all we get from them are brief sound bites. There must be more to the story here, some narrative that Stein doesn’t bother telling us. The other story the film could tell is how the theory of evolution became the dominant explanation for life on Earth. Stein doesn’t do this either.
Expelled ultimately doesn’t deliver what it promises. We’re told that it’s going to show us how academia censors scientists who disagree with the theory of evolution. This would actually make for a pretty interesting movie, but Expelled quickly becomes a long screed against the theory of evolution. There is no story here, just a half-baked essay.
In the era of Michael Moore, audiences have unfortunately come to expect documentaries to break the rules of journalism. They’ve also come to expect them to be entertaining. There will no doubt be some creationists who’ll blame Expelled’s bad reviews on a left-wing press. The truth, though, is that Expelled isn’t a bad movie because it makes a ludicrous argument. It’s a bad movie because it’s poorly made.
SIDEBAR: The other side of Ben Stein
Didn’t know that Ferris Bueller’s lovable economics teacher is also a believer in intelligent design? There’s a few other things most of us don’t know about the actor and gameshow host.
Before his entertainment career, the Yale-educated Stein was a lawyer, a university professor and a speechwriter for U.S. president Richard Nixon. He’s also a pro-life advocate and a Nixon apologist who, in a 2005 op-ed, blamed Bob Woodward and Mark Felt (the journalist and FBI insider, respectively, who made the Watergate Scandal public) for the Cambodian genocide. His reasoning was that, if Nixon hadn’t been toppled in 1974, he could have prevented the rise of the Khmer Rouge.
How did an academic come to reject Darwin’s theory in favour of a religious explanation?
“I don’t think Darwinism explains thermodynamics, the laws of physics or the origin of life,” he told Fast Forward last week during his promotional tour for the film. It turns out science isn’t his only motivation for making the movie. The film tries to connect the theory of evolution to Communism and the Holocaust, and Stein is open about the religious motivation behind the movie.
“Taking God out of the world is very interesting,” he says, blaming the rise of Darwinism for the contemporaneous decline in faith. “Societies that do away with God are in a lot of trouble.”
