Star Trek (2009)

Here’s a Star Trek for the whippersnappers.  As expected, given its intended audience, this Star Trek is all glitz and cool. You don’t need five seconds of an attention span to enjoy this movie, nor do you need a brain.  In fact, what is the difference between this movie and the Fast and Furious series, except that this one takes place in outer space?  James T. Kirk gets to mouth off to tough guys, Spock gets to brood about his interracial family, and Uhuru gets to take her shirt off to reveal her brazier, while lots of things blow up.

Occasionally the Star Trek franchise attempts to be thoughtful, but we shouldn’t expect that from this new movie series.  Consider an episode from the original 1960s series.  Captain Kirk and his merry band land on a pastoral paradise of a planet where some of the crew get sprayed by a chemical from trees.  This chemical gives a person never-ending feelings of pleasure, such that the person cares to do nothing but sit around and laugh and think the world’s a utopia.  Eventually the entire crew, even Mr. Spock, gets sprayed by this chemical, and so you think that they’re all going to be stuck on this planet yucking it up on a kind of marijuana high for eternity.  But no, Captain Kirk somehow realizes internally that he has drive and ambition — a will, if you will — to explore the universe and to not sit around taking drugs all day as a hippie would.  He then proceeds to rescue the crew from its drug-enduced state, and the moral of the story is, don’t be an irresponsible hippie. Surprisingly, in this case, Star Trek could be fairly conservative.

But here, in this new Star Trek movie, we have explosions and lots of deux ex machinas and that’s about all. The moviemakers even expect us to accept the idea that a single star’s supernova explosion can “destroy an entire galaxy.”  If that’s really the case, we suggest that you pack your bags and take that dream vacation you’ve always been wanting to take, right now.

The bad guys are laughably bad.  Supposedly they have waited around twenty-five years to enact revenge on Spock, and their revenge seemingly never subsides, not even when they tell jokes or go to the bathroom.  Here is an example of where the creators of this movie took a piece of Star Trek lore — the bad guy Khan, combined with other bad guys — dumbed it down (if such a thing is possible) and regurgitated it in this movie.  If you’ve watched much Star Trek you’ve already seen the torture bug, an insect they insert into the body of a captured victim, and you’re going to see it again in this movie.

The multicultural angle doesn’t work in this movie.  There’s no point to having a Scot and a Japanese male, let alone a Russian (we’re not in the Cold War anymore so who cares about that?).  Obviously if all of these ethnicities persist into the 23rd century, then nationalism and a relatively strong taboo on interracial marriage are still in vogue on Earth, which is the opposite of what Star Trek says we should aspire too. More bizarrely, after the planet Vulcan is destroyed and only 10,000 Vulcans are left, we are supposed to genuinely care for Spock’s “people.”  It’s at this point that the movie practically screams, “Hey, Spock needs a Vulcan wife and he needs to get busy making Vulcan babies so that the Vulcan race can survive.”  But no.  Spock and Uhuru have the hots for each other.  This movie has a number of similar unresolved contradictions, which you are not supposed to think about (because you are not supposed to think, duh!).

The Federation remains a multicultural empire which dominates its territory by peace through strength, desires to expand its dominion, and competes with other single-ethnicity empires (Klingons, Romulans, etc.).    The militarism of Star Fleet goes hand in hand with the diversity of its male and female warriors.  In the middle of it all is the hero, Captain Kirk. He gets in bar fights, cheats on his school exams, drives fast cars off cliffs (in Iowa, where there are no cliffs at all), and gets promoted to the highest levels of the multicultural empire at a young age. You’d think that Starfleet would be in serious trouble with leaders like this.  In real life, it would be.

Entertainment: 7 (if you get your buddies together and make fun of the movie’s absurdities, it’s definitely a 10)

Intelligence: 1

Morality: 1

Paul Blart: Mall Cop

The premise of Paul Blart: Mall Cop is hilarious by itself.  Here you’ve got a mall security guard, with no gun and no social authority, vying for respectability in an upper-class shopping mall, a place filled with women and elderly folk.  Like most rent-a-cops, Paul Blart is overweight and bumbling.  He’s at the lowest end of the hierarchy of police and security guards, and yet he takes his duty seriously.   That duty includes stopping senior citizens who are speeding through the mall in their electric carts.

There are of course a lot of ways to screw this premise up, and the movie producers did that plenty of times here.  But Paul Blart: Mall Cop isn’t all that bad. It’s not horrifically stupid or vulgar, which is 90% of making a decent movie comedy these days.

Blart himself probably represents the intended audience for this movie.  He’s a lower middle-class, middle-aged white guy with a sweettooth.  In the movie’s opening scenes, Blart tries out as a state trooper, only to be thwarted by his hypoglycemia.  Disappointed, Blart returns home to where his mother and daughter reside.  Blart’s daughter, whom he clearly loves, is the child of a love affair in which Blart was fooled by an illegal immigrant from Mexico into marrying the immigrant and thus granting her citizenship.   Blart then goes to his job, which he loves, even though no one takes him seriously.  And, finally, Blart pines for the love of a woman.

Inevitably there’s a love interest, a major problem, and a showdown.  It was right to have the major showdown take place in the mall, which is really an indoor carnival.   The main problem is that this showdown — which lasts half the movie — doesn’t exploit the possibilities of the premise, and it’s absurd without being all that funny.   With some tweaks — a better cast and improved writing — this movie could’ve been pretty darn good.

The best thing about Paul Blart is that it blows away all of the pretentious Cannes-Telluride-Oscar-winning nonsense  that’s so often marketed as “artistic greatness.”  Blart is the kind of guy we middle-class, middle Americans all know, and because we know him we enjoy watching him and laughing at him.  Someday some movie studio is going to figure this out.

Entertainment: 6

Intelligence: 1

Morality: 7

The DaVinci Code

Giving credit where it’s due, Dan Brown did resurrect the Holy Grail story.  Sure, we all know he ripped off Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum to do it, but who among you doesn’t get his blood stirred over a story of some valiant soul searching for the Holy Grail?

So here we have Tom Hanks searching for the cup of Christ.  Hanks is a professor of symbology at Harvard, who tells us that triangles and towers and church steeples are phallic objects that represent men, but that inverted triangles and upside-down steeples represent females.  Necessarily then, the cup of Christ is female, which means that Leonardo da Vinci painted his The Last Supper with an obscured Mary Magdalene next to Christ, who fathered lots of kids.  The Knights Templars guarded the Christ-Magdalene line of kiddies, while the Catholic Church, beginning at the Council of Nicaea, tried to destroy this secret bloodline of Jesus Christ.

It’s all supposed to be total nonsense turned into suspenseful fun, but the protestors do have a point.  The movie moves from one scene to the next very briskly, barely giving its viewers enough time to understand which character knows what piece of information.  But when it gets to the point where it explains the stuff about Mary Magdalene, the movie dwells and dwells on the long history of it, as if to say we really should consider its wacko theory.  There are even plenty of flashbacks to 300 AD to visually support the explanation that Jesus did in fact father children and the “fact” that Christians killed lots of women in order to preserve their cult of personality.

Really, Brown has absorbed multicultural nonsense and spit it back at his eager readers.  We hear an awful lot about how the Christian church has persecuted women and children and blacks and gays and cattle and Star Trek fans and all other oppressed minorities throughout history.  To The DaVinci Code, the Church is pretty much the big bully who is stomping the faces of everyone forever.    Presumably, if only Hanks could find Mary Magdalene’s grave, this persecution will end.

Well he does find Mary Magdalene’s grave and the Holy Grail — those being two seperate things — only you’ll have to wait until the sequel to find out if he ultimately takes down the Vatican.  But perhaps in that one Hanks will instead discover that the Prophet Muhammed sired a secret bloodline that all Muslims everywhere have oppressed for centuries.  This bloodline crossed with Christ’s bloodline to form a Super Prophet, only Hanks has to discover the City of Atlantis and find the Abominable Snowman first, before he learns that he himself is the Super Prophet.  This could be a great movie, except that all Muslims everywhere would have to promise not to order a fatwah on the heads of Ron Howard and Tom Hanks.  Fat chance, since mocking Islam is not P.C. at present.

Entertainment:5

Intelligence: 0

Morality: 0

The Mosquito Coast

“The United States is going to hell in a handbasket,” so we’ve heard many say, including the main character of this movie, The Mosquito Coast.  The movie provides a reasonable moral warning to those who think they want to pack up to leave this country for a better land, either because the country’s going socialistic, going capitalistic, getting immoral, or any which way you think is bad.  As well, The Mosquito Coast is a commentary on the classic American ethos: self-made, independent, and always on the go.

Here the main character, Allie Fox, is a genius inventor who grumpily complains to his oldest son that America is going down the toilet.  “We eat when we’re not hungry, drink when we’re not thirsty. We buy what we don’t need and throw away everything that’s useful,” Allie complains while in a grocery chain store.  He is not a Marxist, however, but a quasi-traditionalist who believes partly in classic American values and completely in his own self-determination.  Fox’s complaints include consumer culture, the possibility of nuclear war, and increasing dependence on government.  He has an absolute trust in progress, and he demands that others adopt his pluck and inventiveness: “It’s an absolute sin to accept the decadence of obsolescence. Why do things get worse and worse? They don’t have to. They could get better and better.”

Fed up with the United States, Fox decides to pick up his family of six and move to the Mosquito Coast, manifesting his American spirit.  Even though he is sick of the U.S., Fox is thoroughly American.  He wants to enter a natural paradise and create civilization, a civilization on his own terms.   He wants the wilderness and the machine at the same time, with himself in control and as few people around as possible.

So Fox and family move to the jungle in the Caribbean and end up buying a small village in the middle of nowhere.  Along the way Fox runs into a charismatic missionary, Reverend Spellgood.  As something of an atheist, Fox demonstrates that he is the intellectual better of the two, and thereafter the two become rivals, competing for the hearts and minds of the locals.  Spellgood doesn’t much like what Fox is up to, and Fox thinks Spellgood is a charlatan.  In a sense, the movie seems to say, both are two of the same spirit: crafty leaders, one scientific and one religious, both quintessentially American.

Needless to say, Fox’s social and scientific experiments are utter failures, in stark contrast to his views on human progress.  Fox directly compares himself to Dr. Frankenstein, an apt comparison which plays out symbolically in the fate of Fox’s pet project, an enormous ice machine that uses nothing but fire and ammonia to make ice.

The story is told through the eyes of Fox’s son, Charlie Fox, a teenager who is unsure how to view his independently-minded father.  Fox’s entire family suffers from his obsessions and self-centeredness, especially in the latter stages of the movie when Fox takes them all — starving and weary — on a raft up a river, ala Heart of Darkness.  There are a number of discussion items for fathers and husbands in a study group to get out of this movie, particularly on the subject of overbearing or tyrannical family leaders.

To be sure, there are a number of flaws in the movie.  For example, the local Caribbeans are treated cinematically almost as noble savages.  Innocent and good-hearted, they are the pawns of Fox and Goodspeed.  The tribal drumbeats even serve to tempt young Charlie, who eschews the call to go native. The movie — in typical late 20th century fashion — compares the ambitious Americans with the happy-go-lucky Third Worlders.  In most respects it seems the Third Worlders are better, though the movie clearly serves to praise and critique the Fox family, while allowing the natives to only be background participants in the drama.

In spite of these and other flaws, The Mosquito Coast is intriguing enough to watch carefully.  It’s worthwhile to resurrect it in a time when your conservative or far-left friends are grumbling loudly about socialism and fascism and our national downward spiral.

Entertainment: 8

Intelligence: 7

Morality: 7 (on par with Pixar and other animated films, in terms of the lack of sex and bad language)

The Karate Kid

Ah, the mid-1980s.  When Italian-Americans could team up with Japanese-Americans to defeat rich, white California karate snots.  The Karate Kid was a monster hit way back when, playing in theaters for several months and capturing the hearts of soon-to-be 30- and 40-somethings.  Most people are terribly nostalgic about this movie, but frankly almost all of it has aged badly.

For many, this movie probably captured some kind of high school experience.  In it we find crummy ’80s pop music, adrenaline-pumping fights between bullies and the bullied, and a new kid in town who instantly captures the heart of a rich, popular blonde.  Basically it’s story of a weak outsider who hates his school but ends up learning lots of life lessons and becoming a cool dude.  This is the personal dream of millions who never come close to satisfying it.

The movie stalls and stalls only until Mr. Miyagi enters the picture, the only redeeming feature of the movie twenty-five years after its release.  A Japanese-American who can barely speak English, but who we are led to believe served in the U.S. Army in WWII (yeah, right!), Miyagi serves as a father-figure for the teenage boy main character, Daniel.  Of course the screenwriters aren’t idiots.  Daniel does not have a father, because a father would only get in the way of the teenager learning martial arts and becoming ultra cool.

Miyagi is in the movie mostly to dispense Oriental ways and wisdom to his student, who must learn karate in six weeks so that he can defeat much larger men who have studied karate all their lives.  To teach his student karate, Miyagi has Daniel wax cars and paint fences and houses.  After three days of menial labor, Daniel is a professional at defensive karate moves.

Miyagi then proceeds to teach Daniel the “crane kick,” a karate move that is so effective that there is no defense for it.  The move involves standing on one leg and raising both arms, then delivering a swift kick to an opponent’s face.  Somehow the move is ultra-powerful even though it involves jumping and therefore momentarily losing one’s balance, which is never good.  Moreover, this move is an ancient one which Miyagi, who learned it from his father, passes down to his surrogate son.  A lot of this movie is about Daniel, a high school American immersed in pop culture, learning about one of the only traditions within a thousand miles of him. When Miyagi miraculously heals Daniel twice with a rubdown, we know that in this movie Miyagi’s traditional magic is the elixir Daniel is going to need.

If all this seems ridiculous, it’s probably supposed to be.  That’s without even mentioning Daniel’s blooming relationship with a blonde who, in real life, wouldn’t give him the time of day.  But this is movie magic, so Daniel gets the girl, wins the fight, and therefore gets to play the winner.

Entertainment: 6

Intelligence: 1

Morality: 5

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford

Don’t be fooled by the title. This movie sounds as if it’s going to model one of those wild and cool dime novels of the late 19th century.  You know the ones with elaborate treasure hunts, train robberies, and escapes — the kind of thing Tom Sawyer suckered Huck Finn into at the end of Huckleberry Finn.

No, none of that.  Instead, this is a meandering, weenie psychodrama of a movie.  Which is a heckuva feat, because any Jesse James story ought to be far from meandering.

But first, we’ll give some due credit to the movie for the sake of our film-loving friends.  This movie is nicely shot — good cinematography and lighting — and they get the sets and costumes perfect for the period.  And then there’s the language, which is marvelous.  You don’t hear too many people calling the outhouse “the privy” these days, nor a playboy an “inamorato.”   Lots of good 19th century jargon in this one, so watch it with the subtitles.

Unfortunately the movie focuses far too closely on its two main guys, James and Robert Ford.  James’ character, played by Brad Pitt, is never consistent.  He seems to change personalities every ten minutes — gregarious, gloomy, playful, sadistic, all of these and more.  Pitt didn’t even follow the movie’s opening description of James, who, we are told, had a physical condition that made him constantly blink his eyes. Pitt instead plays James like a movie star would, with eyelids glued open.

Ford, on the other hand, is well acted by modern standards.  A young pup with a James’ obsession, because he’s read the zany dime novels about James, Ford has self-esteem issues related to being the lowest member in the James’ gang’s hierarchy.  Still, Ford doesn’t seem like the kind of guy who’d boldly rob trains and kill someone if need be.   He has more in common with a brooding Gen. X, Ethan Hawke character, which means he ’s pretty much a weenie throughout.

Both James and Ford here seem to have a celebrity/fan relationship, as well as a mafioso/underling one.  Ford is obsessed with James’ famous name, so much so that the movie suggests he killed James in order to become a celebrity like James.  More bizarrely, the movie’s ending suggests that James groomed Ford into killing him.  For no good reason, James wants to be killed by Ford, as if to win some kind of psychological wrestling match.  There’s no way the real James would even do such a thing.  Only a therapeutic culture doped up on psychotropic meds could dream up something this weird.

Yeah, the movie is really slow.  It’s got an Andrei Tarkovsky-like pace, only with the bad habits of Terrance Malick.  It makes us ponder the looks on people’s faces for what seems like forever.  In one extended scene, we have to dwell on the petty infidelity of a young wife and a member of the James’ gang, which is totally pointless.

This is a travesty to the historical accounts of James, which are quite exciting.  If you don’t believe us read the Wikipedia article on him.    Even stranger is that James and post-Civil War Missouri are morally and politically complex subjects.  That’s just the kind of subject Hollywood loves to explore, but for some reason we get none of that here.  James and his gang had political motivations for their deeds, as well as personal ones, since James’ own house was firebombed.  The movie relates none of this, except to show that the governor of Missouri (played by James Carville) is out to get James.

Probably this all means skip the movie, save yourself three hours of your life, and stick to reading about James if you’re at all interested.

Entertainment: 4

Intelligence: 6

Morality: 3 (yes, the movie shows us that we are all sinful — well duh!)

The Right Stuff

So after reading Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff, we were curious about its cinematic depiction.  We’ve read the book too recently to make this judgment, but Wolfe’s book might be in our top-15.  That’s top 15 books we’ve ever read, which includes many books written before 1900, FYI.

Anyway, as is typical of white people like us, the movie just doesn’t compare, and that darn sure makes us upset.

The Right Stuff movie is simply a collection of the best scenes from the book, all strung together without an obvious point.  For example, we get the scene where Alan Shepherd, preparing to become the first American in space, has to urinate while sitting in his capsule waiting for launch.  Should he go, or not?  Wolfe has dozens of funny, unexpected moments of the early American space program, tied together with two or three key themes.  The movie tries but ultimately fails in communicating those themes.

One of them is the pilot hierarchy, the ziggurat that all pilots attempt to ascend, in order to become the best.  Those at the top of the ziggurat have “the right stuff,” which Wolfe cleverly rephrases several times as “the righteous stuff.”  Basically, in the early ’60s, the astronauts-turned-pilots were a modern version of an ancient warrior-class, and they were treated as such by American citizens and their media.

Wolfe contrasts one part of the pilot hierarchy, the rocket plane pilots, which included Chuck Yeager, with the Mercury astronauts.  Wolfe’s implicit point is that the rocket pilots were really the ones who deserved the glory that the astronauts received.  After all, the rocket pilots were breaking air speed records regularly, flying into space, and actually controlling the crafts they were flying in.  By contrast, the Mercury astronauts were doing the same things that NASA-trained chimpanzees were trained to do: push a bunch of buttons, sit on a rocket, and don’t panic.  The Mercury astronauts weren’t really piloting anything, even though they really wanted to be.

The movie attempts this contrast, especially with Yeager’s character, but the whole point of the difference between the two sets of pilots is lost because there is no narrator to explain it.  We are left to infer the pilot group differences from the images, but a lot of explanation was apparently left out in the editing room.  So Yeager in this movie becomes just another brave American hero; he’s almost kind of a throw-in here, and so it would’ve made sense to leave him out.  Whereas the book ends with the bravest exploit of all — Yeager’s last flight, in which he had to eject and nearly had his finger and face burnt off — the movie ends with a minor Mercury astronaut flying into space right after Yeager’s insane flight.

What then is this movie’s thesis?  It is difficult to tell.  Maybe it’s that the early astronauts were ordinary guys with ordinary gals as wives, all caught up in a world-historical event.  But that’s a maybe.  It’s really hard to tell.

There’s more we could say, but let’s forego that and end with a simple, constant piece of advice: don’t watch the movie, and instead read the book.  The book is far better than the movie.

Entertainment: 6

Intelligence: 4

Morality: 5

Vantage Point

Vantage Point is a wannabe clever movie with lots of B-list actors, all of whom probably looked at the script and thought it was “thought-provoking.”  That’s because the movie tells its story by presenting six or seven different perspectives of the same 20-minute event, which is the President’s assassination in Spain.  Any halfway knowledgable moviegoer is going to look at this movie and say within five minutes “That’s just like Rashomon.”  Whereas Rashomon was a cinematic examination of the problem of truth as presented through different perspectives, Vantage Point is really just a cheap action thriller that tells its story through multiple perspectives for the sake of a gimmick.

That’s not to say that you won’t get something out of the movie.  Even the most mindnumbingly stupid cultural production tells us something.  In this case, the movie gives us a rather wimpy Hollywoodish stance on the “War on Terror.”  The President, for example, is conveniently assassinated in Spain, which makes it impossible to tell if the assassins are Spanish, North African, or Arab.    Working with the assassins is a turncoat Secret Service agent, whose one and only ideological line, uttered while dying, is, “This war will never end.”  Does that mean that those who disagree with a global war on an abstraction are turncoat traitors?

Ah, but of course not, for this is a Hollywood production, which aims to please all of the people all of the time.  While our white American traitor thinks the war will never end, the President is busy telling his aides that he will not — CANNOT! he says — retaliate against a possible terrorist base somewhere way far away.   The President’s aides, of course, are warhawks who desire to blow up anybody who isn’t them.  But the President is more magnanimous in uttering the campy line, “We don’t have to act brave, we have to BE brave.”  Here we have the movie’s ideology, a muddy middle ground wherein everyone is stuck between loving the power to wage war and talking like they don’t want to wage war.

Meanwhile, lots of needless chases with pointless characters occur.  The redeeming quality of this movie — like so many action thrillers — is that it can be readily mocked in company that is willing to mock dumb movies.  Apparently the writers of this movie think that everyone watching is like Alice’s White Queen, who believed six impossible things before breakfast.  More realistically, this movie will try to make you believe a thousand impossible things after dinner, which can be fun if you want a totally mindless sort of evening.

Entertainment: 6

Intelligence: 0

Morality: –

Harry Potter and the SomethingorOther

As we left Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, a ten-year old boy complained to his parents that “this movie had no character development!”

We’d say the lad is a budding movie critic.  Indeed, son, there is no character development, but in fact what Harry Potter movie has had one second of character development?  Sure, in this particular movie there’s a lot of teenage oogling and crying in many insufferable scenes about adolescent love. And the whole Potter series is roughly about growing up.  But that’s about it.

Harry is still Harry, which means he must get into trouble, do some magic, combat evil.  All in a day’s work for an archetype.

If there is a plot to this movie, someone should carefully diagram it out for us.  We mean, either there was a plot, a very intricate, unintelligible one (to laymen), or there was no plot at all.  We weren’t sure.  This Potter movie, like many of the others, seems like it simply treads water, waiting for the big finale in the last movie — the climactic tidal wave –to crash down on our heads.  There was something about Horcruxes and Death Eaters and lots of characters we vaguely remembered, but all of that starts to run together for those of us who don’t see the point of all this Potter mythology.

We have been waiting for Harry to combat ultimate evil for, oh, six movies.  Eventually the forces of Good will face the forces of evil, but these movies have taken approximately fifteen hours to get to that point.  As they say in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, “Get on with it!”

Entertainment: 7

Intelligence:0

Morality: 3 (hard to believe this is a PG movie)

Knowing

Knowing is yet another Hollywood commercial product that dumbs down the philosophical material it contains and turns it into hogwash.  Ten minutes into the movie, you know you’ve seen this all before — creepy kids who hear whispers, mysterious numbers that seem to predict the future, and philosophical lectures by the stereotypical scientist as main character.

The movie features Nicolas Cage as an astrophysicist at MIT (yeah, right!) who specializes in solar radiation.  This astrophysicist gives us a lengthy lecture early in the movie about the sun’s power and randomness vs. determinism, a lecture that experienced moviegoers will understand is a giveaway to the ending of the movie.  Of course this astrophysicist believes in randomness, even though his dad is a pastor and he has recently lost his wife.  Does he not know he is in a Hollywood movie, wherein he will be required to find the vaguest of faiths in some higher power?  Here, he finds faith in “heaven,” ultimately realizing that once we die, we’ll all just be okay.  It doesn’t get any deeper than that, dear reader, but did you expect it to?

Undoubtedly the starry-eyed Christian movie reviewers elsewhere will praise this movie for its “Christian elements.”  After all, the movie favors a predestined plan implemented by a higher power, it calls its characters to “faith” in something, and it features the Bible for a few minutes.  Of course “Christian elements” can be found anything if we look hard enough.  The Koran, the Bhagavad-Gita, the Analects of Confucius — plenty of “Christian elements” here.  There’s even potential glory in any sewer, right?

SPOILER ALERT.  Knowing follows the “theory” of Intelligent Design to one of its logical conclusions by claiming that angel aliens — who are creepy white men until the end of the movie — have planned our futures for us.  Ultimately two children get raptured to another planet, to start all over as a sort of Adam and Eve.  These two children are “chosen,” while at the same time everyone and everything on Earth has to die, even though the angel aliens have the technology and ability to transport everyone off the Earth to safety.  Not the nicest of guys, these angel aliens.

And why are movies like this always so bleak about the end of the Earth?  Knowing takes global warming to the extreme, as the Earth in consumed in a wave of solar radiation so powerful that it scorches everything. Just before this heat wave of destruction, our faithless astrophysicist learns to accept death and the words of his pastor father, who consoles us with the view that everything’s going to be alright after death.

Meanwhile, the two kids are raptured into the heavens just like Richard Dreyfuss was at the end of Close Encounters of the Third Kind.  Apparently we all just want to escape this hideous planet, which we are destroying at an alarming rate, and even if we aren’t destroying it all that fast something else will destroy it for us.  For once, we’d like to see a movie where the Earth is renewed.  (Oh wait, that was Wall-E’s point.)

Actually we liked the last five minutes of this movie, as the director (Alex Proyas) overcame the movie’s lame script with good visuals and the Adam-and-Eve surprise.  Prior to that, the characters go into the dark woods just because this movie is supposed to scare us, and when they aren’t going into the dark woods they of course live in a secluded house in the dark woods.

Someday someone will make Out of the Silent Planet and far surpass these regurgitated sci-fi flicks.  Granted, C.S. Lewis’ space trilogy will be dumbed down to the point of stupidity, too, but they can’t screw it up completely.

Entertainment: 6

Intelligence: 2

Morality: 5