"Religulous" was a documentary about the ridiculous aspects of religion. Within the first five minutes we learn that Maher is an atheist, a comedian, and a bit of a prick. In Stein and Frankowski's "Expelled", we begin with black and white montage of The Berlin Wall, armed soldiers and huddled masses, this goes on over the credits for about 5 minutes, while a string version of "All Along The Watchtowers" plays. Then we see Stein behind the stage, an eager roaring crowd waiting for him, as he walks from his dressing room like a heavy weight boxer, and emerges into flashing lights with a greeting of "What up, Gangstas?" So from the word go, we know Stein is going for seriousness, drama, and a tiny bit of levity(not comedy, and certainly not satire as the plot synopsis suggests). We learn nothing about Steins personal views, other than that he is an impartial curious party, interested in defending free speech, wherever he finds it. Maher(who appears in a brief clip here), and Stein both use editing to their advantage, in order to smear, their subjects, but no matter how rude or impish Maher was he's never really dishonest, Stein and co edit quotations of Charles Darwin and Margaret Sanger, to make them into Eugenicists bigots, who all but built the blue prints to Nazi Death camps. Sanger, was a eugenicists but her politics began and ended with giving women birth control and allowing them to make their own decisions. Darwins quote says yes eugenics makes sense, you wouldn't breed inferior animals, etc, but Stein cuts off the next sentence which says, something to the effect that to ignore the weak and helpless, would be to ignore the noblest human virtues, and would be an invitation to great evils.
Richard Dawkins becomes the Darth Vader of the film, mocked in a cartoon, referred to as a reptile, the architect of division, and the climatic end interview pushes past dishonesty to discontinuity. When Stein asks Dawkins if there is any way that Intelligent Design would be possible, Dawkins responds, that if some advanced civilization seeded earth millions of years ago, maybe there could be some molecular signature, but even those advanced creatures would themselves have had to evolve. There the frame freezes, and Stein says "Woah, waoh, waoh, Richard Dawkins believes in Intelligent Design?" This explanation is also called Pansperima which is laughed at earlier in the film as "Darwinists believe in aliens???" There are no interviews with scientists who believe in evolution and religion, according to the film, even if they were to interview them it would be pointless, because they would only just be saying that to save their jobs.
The films charges include, that Darwinism leads to atheism, which leads to moral erosion, which leads to Nazism. The most emotionally manipulative sequence is a tour through a Nazi camp where the handicapped were executed. Darwin also leads to Planned Parenthood and abortion, makes life meaningless, and encourages suicide! While ID, can allow us to discover the existence of God...which will give us the opposite of all that. Societies who worship Gods, will limit themselves in what they will do to other peoples, is another claim. ID is not religious though, and has nothing to do with Creatonism or God. As many of it's proponents say, bringing religion into it is a Darwinist smear campaign to make them seem like fanatics.
There's a Nova documentary called "Intelligent Design On Trial" about the Dover school board case vs. the discovery institute, who was supplying ID books to their schools, school board lawyers won the case when they found early versions of the text books, which had a Freudian slip, and used the word "creationism", where they meant ID...
Very little time is devoted to exploring the cases of any of the scientists fired for their ID convictions. And even less time is given to explaining what advances ID has given science or could lead to. The film focuses mostly on negative proof, the horrors of Darwinism and atheism. And how time and time again, ID proponents are dismissed from their positions, for their controversial views.
I'm prepared to believe that scientists are just as biased as everyone else, if James Watson's comments last year taught us anything it's as much. Maybe Darwin is like Newtonian Physics and one day will discover an Evolutionary equivalent of Einstiens Relativity, but Steins pretentious examination, of an interesting subject, just makes a paranoid, conspiracy ridden mess of things. Its not even remotely funny, and at times downright dishonest. But it is thought provoking in a number ways, like is a movie bad, just because it's wrong? The music and editing was well done. The cartoon where Dawkins, is at the slot machine of life, trying to get all the necessary proteins to create a primordial soup, made me smile a bit. But if you look into any of this films many claims(a 5 to 10 minute goggle search should do it), it falls apart.
