swburgess1957-62-966013

Derivative; Antiseptic; Atmospheric for the sake of tourist/holiday atmosphere (Paris; exotic reference; stock evil; blocked writer making his bones at prestigious institution of learning... .) Yes, the cat is black. This re-imagining of the original rests evidently upon the presumption that there is something to be gained by introducing characters who have no clear connection with the narrative, in addition to larding the product with scenes of gratuitous incoherency and gore. At one level or another, dream-sequence passages of leaps from windows, ad nauseum, detract essentially from the inner core of cinematic verity: We know we are heading down. Otherwise, see the Original. Polanski. Weird. Brilliant. Horrific.

In simplest terms, this is a movie that is fun to watch if you have no particular expectations about what a philosophy class is all about, and don't really care; or if you just want to (re)confirm your personal belief system concerning the "Existence of God". Or maybe you just want to have a few laughs while the Prof and the Earnest Kid get into it over two very distinct domains of thought: the one of a kind of Medievalist's speculative philosophy along the lines of Saint Anselm's famous "proof", the other following the scientific paradigm of "Testability, Repeatability, Consistency" in observed (empirical) phenomena. It doesn't really matter. Logic is a branch of philosophy, but any professor who claims that the "nonexistence" of "God" is subject to meaningful proof is a professor of something else -- economics, say. "Something exists such that it is not the case that "God AND Dead"" is not a valid argument. "Something exists such that it is the case that "God AND Not Dead"" isn't either. Now, whether or not the King of France is Bald -- that's an interesting argument. And Kevin Sorbo is just plain funny-weird.

I had some hope for this movie until perhaps 20 minutes in. While I wouldn't disregard the possibilities inherent in even a fairly derivative rendering of the post-apocalyptic World Order made tolerable by an instituting of castes -- based upon an amalgam of Platonic categories and the societal reductionism of a Brave New World ethos -- I was quickly dismayed, even put off, by the conventionalist attitudes and cultural inhibitions of the characters as such. One is supposedly to be disturbed, perhaps traumatized, by the expectation that defecation is to be consummated in an open bay of toilets; the "mess hall" scene that follows, while suggestive only of the utilitarian efficiency of an industrial, prison-like dining facility, is rendered trivial and basely comic by a dual commentary upon the ingesting of "hamburger", followed by an absurd and pseudo-intellectual analysis of the food in question. Never having suffered the indignities of Boot Camp in any branch of the military; terrified of exposing their bowel movements to one another in a jail cell; reviled at the prospect of eating lousy fast food -- the privileged participants in this plastic vision of a possible future fail at the outset with their pedestrian and Bourgeois lack of vital capacity or open-mindedness.