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)

Enchanted

Enchanted is another fouled-up fairy tale, like Shrek and whatever snarky twists on folk stories they’re putting out these days.  We can’t go anywhere without encountering snark.  It’s all over the Internet.  It’s all over TV.  Everywhere, everyone seems to want to make a pointed, wry barb out of something serious.

Thankfully, Enchanted is not all snark.  It is also sappy at times and bizarre at others.  Probably the most enjoyable moments occur when the princess, from the cartoon world of storybook ideals, meets the real world.   She plays her character straight, or as it were, cartoonish.  Still, you will have to deal with a pigeon eating a cockroach right after the cheery “Happy Working Song.”  This is what we mean by snark.

There is good-heartedness here, but that’s what all Walt Disney musicals have.  The plot?  In the cartoon world, a prince rescues a lady, and they decide to marry.  The prince’s mother, however, tricks the lady into falling down a dark hole, the end of which is the three-dimensional world of New York City.  The princess walks around New York, bewildered, until she stumbles into a divorce lawyer.  The cartoon prince, obviously, finds out where his princess is and follows her into the real world.   A hunt ensues.  The characters spontaneously burst into song.  Lots of fish out of water scenes.  You’ve seen all of this before, though this movie feels slightly above average, thanks to good casting.

Kudos to Disney for portraying evil witches as evil witches.  Unfortunately the princess is a princess in 2007, not 1907.  So she looks like a Barbie doll but dresses like she’s desperate for a male.  There are at least two scenes in which the princess accidentally enters a wet T-shirt contest, thanks to the weather, and one in which she gets caught in a bathroom shower.  Her cleavage is available for all to see throughout the movie.  She is supposed to be naive.  After watching this movie, your boys will not be.

Entertainment: 7

Intelligence: 3

Morality: 4

Forbidden Planet (1956)

Forbidden Planet is a classic sci-fi male fantasy, featuring taxing analytical problems that must be solved and a super-naive babe who is anxious to be kissed by any male simply because she is curious.  Shockingly, Forbidden Planet now seems slightly smarter than its blockbuster pals of today.  That’s not a compliment, just a comparison.

Anyone who has watched just a few episodes of Star Trek will recognize Forbidden Planet’s familiar formula.  Commander J.J. Adams and his merry crew are military bureaucrats investigating the disappearance of a planet’s colony.  The colony has a lone survivor, Dr. Morbius, who warns the crew not to land on the planet.  This wouldn’t be a movie without the crew defying his warning, so they plop down on Planet Forbidden and display their military might.

Morbius treats the crew to his created paradise.  His do-it-all robot can manufacture gallons of whisky, his backyard is full of exotic pleasures, and in the middle of Morbius’ Garden of Eden is his young, innocent, virgin daughter, Alta.  She’s never seen a man before except her own dad, so when she goes swimming, she doesn’t realize that undressing in the presence of men who have been holed up on a spaceship for years is sort of risque.  As we said, male fantasy.

Of course, Morbius is hiding secrets.  The planet he inhabites was once home to a race of ancient beings known as the Krell.  The Krell manufactured an absolutely enormous whirligig, which everybody is impressed by.  Morbius claims that this whirligig has doubled his IQ to 200-something.  What the whirligig really does is vague — supposedly it allows its operator’s brain to create a material substance out of a mental picture.  You’d think the Krell, being a race of super-beings, would’ve tried to economize on their design.  But no, the whirligig is thousands of miles of tunnels and shafts, which uses trillions of tons of natural resources, all just to project a hologram from Dr. Morbius’ brain.

Forbidden Planet is a bizarre mix of Freudian psychology and American progressivism, with even a couple of references to “God” at the beginning and end of the movie.  The hero is clearly the plucky, by-the-book Adams.  Morbius, the resident super-genius, cannot figure out the vexing problem of why Adams’ crew is slowly being killed off.  Of course it’s up to Adams — the American hero, the guy who wins Eve, and the one whom Morbius laughs at for “having a mediocre IQ” — to solve all of the movie’s problems. “Of course, how could I not have known?” Morbius exclaims, as Adams reveals to him exactly what has been going on.  So much for cognitive differences.  The middle-class, American military hero — not the brilliant inventor and scholar — is the one with all of the right answers.

Should we recommend this movie?  Maybe, if you have time to waste.  It would be silly to be merely entertained by Forbidden Planet, but it is fun to analyze.  We — actually just one of us — are suckers for sci-fi schlock.  Everyone has his weaknesses.  If your weaknesses are PBS productions of Jane Austen, or lame-brain comedies, Forbidden Planet probably isn’t for you.

Entertainment: 6

Intelligence: 4

Morality: 5

Stranger Than Fiction

Stranger Than Fiction is one of those movies that make people feel smart afterwards, even though three minutes of reflection or discussion would obliterate that feeling. Its main feature is an old story trick — a character who becomes aware that he is being written, that he is a part of a story that he cannot ultimately influence. That trick was novel back in 1914 when Miguel de Unamuno published Niebla. It still felt novel back when Italo Calvino was using it in the ’70s and ’80s. Today, after decades of employment, it feels no more interesting than any other cute narrative trick. But few audience members are aware of Unamuno, Calvino, Vonnegut, Foucault, or anyone else with some influence on Stranger Than Fiction, so we aren’t trying to be hard on them. It’s only to say that this trick has been done before, and it’s been done much better.

So what’s the point of it? Some Christians might say that the movie incorporates some kind of truth about the paradox of predestination and free will. The story is that Harold Crick, a nerdy IRS agent, begins to hear the voice of an omniscient narrator who describes Crick’s action in the third-person. Crick realizes that someone else is controlling him, so he goes to the most obvious person you’d go to in this situation: a college English professor. The professor asks: is Crick in a comedy or a tragedy? That’s the key question for the movie itself. You will know the answer if you know what movie audiences want and how this movie was marketed.

So people might try to allegorize this plot as the relationship between God and the creatures who he created in his image, but there are simpler explanations. Viewed through the lense of discourse theory, Stranger Than Fiction is about how people are “written” by the dominate conventions and uses of language. Rather than explain this in a complicated way, we’ll try a familiar example. Imagine the millions of people who hear about global warming on a regular basis. The way global warming is talked about shapes the thought-patterns of these people when it comes to the topic of global warming. When the subject comes up for them, they can only mimic what they’ve heard. This is as true of the anti- position as the pro- position. Now imagine this kind of mass mimicking occurring on a wide range of subjects. Imagine it happening for all of a person’s thoughts and actions in life. The theory says that the lifeways of people are shaped by dominate uses of language, its grammar, its syntax, and the ideas that it includes and excludes.

In this interpretation, it’s the writers who have the power, because obviously writers shape the language — whether they be novelists, marketers, speechwriters, or other members of mass media. Also, of secondary importance, are the intellectuals who can interpret language and the business people who sell language. Stranger Than Fiction incorporates characters of all three types — in the form of a famous novelist, a college professor, and a publishing agent. The bourgeois Crick and his hip girlfriend are basically under their control.

Crick is sort of resurrected in the end, saved from an inevitable death by the person who writes his life. He is saved to a more blissful life, to a sexual union with a tattooed entrepreneur for a girlfriend. In the Christian cosmos, this ending means tragedy — saved in order to continue a modern life of materialism — but in this movie it means comedy. We did not come away feeling smart; instead, we felt tricked.

Entertainment: 6

Intelligence: 4

Morality: 1

Hellboy 2: The Golden Army

Hellboy 2 is essentially a glorified puppet show. It might be the best such show ever made, outdoing all previous movie spectacles in terms of costumes, makeup, and creature creation. There isn’t a two-minute stretch in this movie where some new, bizarre creature is featured onscreen. Where do they all come from? Hellboy 2 is content to let them all show up without explanation. Its fantasy world is not the troll market or the underground city of the Golden Army, but the real world of Manhattan and its human beings, which barely make an appearance, except to get pummeled by a giant forest creature.

As puppet shows go, meaningful plots are lacking. But what did we expect from a movie with this title? Hellboy 2’s creature display gets kickstarted by a basic problem: the mythological world’s truce with the human world is under threat, because Prince Nuada wants to reawaken the golden army and destroy humans. Nuada’s big beef is that humanity has made too many parking lots. We disagree — we can’t ever find a space anywhere — but Nuada has read too many Greenpeace tracts to think otherwise. His anthrophobia leads him to attempt to destroy New York City with a creature whose gigantic arms are covered in clovers. That’s surely the most exciting solution to global warming yet.

Hellboy, of course, must save the day. But just when we thought that the movie was making a statement against environmental extremism, it veers towards nuance. Hellboy, to a degree, sees Nuala’s point about humans, who come to despise Hellboy even though he is performing acts of service for them.

But no one is going to come away from this movie with any particular message. If there is one, it’s director Guillermo Del Toro’s neopagan vision of a mostly hidden mythological world. None of his creatures are particularly pretty, nor is there much wide range between them in terms of good and evil. This isn’t Narnia or Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene. Prince Nuada is the worst, but even he is portrayed sympathetically. And the hero of this movie series is, of course, a character who looks like the devil. That Hellboy is charismatic helps, he being the ultimate phlegmatic, a distant cousin of Winnie the Pooh, except for an occasional temper flare. Like its predecessor, Hellboy 2 succeeds in incorporating humor in places where it doesn’t seem possible. Still, we can’t imagine many people we know, particularly younger folk, profiting from this movie. Unless you consider nightmares to be profitable.

Del Toro, it must be said, has caught the George Lucas virus, which has also infected M. Night Shymayalan. He aims to direct and write all of his movies, past box-office success leading him to think that he can write. Not so, Del Toro. Hellboy 2 suffers from being about nothing in particular, so several scenes of heavy emotional weight fall flat. Hellboy’s relationship with his girlfriend is not interesting, nor is his potential one as a father. Given the simplicity of his scripts, it is clear that Del Toro has leaped over his true calling — as a creature creator — and landed in the writer/director chair. It would be wise for him to find a great screenwriter next time, preferably a Christian. The good news is that Del Toro has a readymade story with The Hobbit, which does not suffer from Hellboy and Hellboy 2’s flaws.

Entertainment: 8

Intelligence: 1

Morality: 2

Gunga Din

Gunga Din is a relic now, something that could never be made without completely reversing its underlying messages.  Here you’ve got three British officers, having a good time in the exotic parts of the British empire, yucking it up and turning themselves into heroes at the same time.  And then you have your Thug worshippers of the lovegoddess Kali, who yell “Kill, kill, kill!!!!” so that you know they aren’t headed off to Sunday School.  The Thugs are political rebels as well as idol worshippers, so the whole point of the movie is how the three British officers tame the thugs and steal their gold, all while having a grand old time in the spirit of a 1930s swashbuckling adventure movie.  This kind of thing was remade by Spielberg as Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, but the difference is that Jones is an American individualist, while Gunga Din reinforces the joys and jollies of rule by the British empire.

Now that we’re on this side of WWII and colonialism, they can’t make this movie.  Consider the difference between it and The Man Who Would Be King, another movie based on something written by Rudyard Kipling.  In that movie, two guys go into Afghanistan for gold and military glory.  This is no different than some of the basics of Gunga Din’s plot.  But whereas Gunga Din is about how you could whoop it up while dominating the colonials (just look at the movie poster to the right), The Man Who Would Be King is about how those exotic colonials will get you killed.  In other words, empire can work grandly on that side of WWII.  It’s a total failure on this side of WWII.  This latter point is used and reinforced, of course, by that still-dominant movie vision of empire, Star Wars.

The Bible has a lot to say about empire, but always the chosen people are on the side that the Thugs are in Gunga Din.  Either the smallish Israel, or the church in the New Testament, finds itself squeezed or persecuted by a dominate, idolatrous military and cultural powerhouse.  Two of the major points of Bible stories about empire is that God saves a remnant of the chosen and that those powerhouses aren’t powerhouses for long — they go kaputt, with a bang or a whimper.

Does that mean, at its core, that The Man Who Would Be King is more Biblical than Gunga Din?  Maybe, maybe not.  Politically speaking, maybe.  Religiously speaking, probably not.  In the first movie, it’s the native religious superstition that undoes the phony rule by the two British officers.  That religious superstition, then, triumphs in the end.  Not so in Gunga Din, in which the main point is the British destruction of the bloodthirsty worshippers of the goddess Kali.  Like many Old Testament stories, Gunga Din is a morality play about the destruction of wicked idolatry.  In other words, it seems to us that you’ve got your goods and your bads with both the pro-empire movies and the anti-empire movies.  Watch them with a careful eye.

It’s up to you whether you have a taste for Gunga Din.  People who’ve consumed blockbusters for the last thirty years are apt to be put off by 1930s special effects and overacting.  They probably won’t get the movie language of Gunga Din’s long battle sequence followed right away by a long, semi-comedic dinner scene.  You wouldn’t ever get those two scenes separated but juxtaposed these days.  This is all to say, know your preferences and take the entertainment rating as you need to.

Entertainment:8

Intelligence: 4

Morality: 6

Hellboy

Surfing the TV, we stumbled across an episode of BibleMan.  If you don’t know who BibleMan is, he’s a evangelical superhero ripoff of other way cooler and more popular superheros.  He’s supposed to be a “holier” substitute for parents who think that Batman is the devil.  For example, Bibleman wears the breastplate of righteousness instead of Batman’s chestplate, and a helmet of salvation instead of a bat mask.  (What’s the difference again?)

Anyway, this episode featured Luxor Spawndroth, Bibleman’s arch enemy.  Spawndroth looks like a guy wearing one of those cheesy plastic masks you see in teenage goth stores at Halloween.  So he proceeds to parade around onscreen, performing some kind of unfunny comedy schtick, singing Frank Sinatra songs and acting like a teenager at a youth group party.  Later in the episode, BibleMan — played by a guy who couldn’t give a decent performance in a high school drama club skit — quotes Scripture at Spawndroth and thus defeats him.  Now, despite the disgusting mask, who has been portrayed as being cool?  Undoubtedly, Spawndroth.

We mention this because we think some of our evangelical readers might object, “Why did we watch something evil with the word ‘hell’ in it?”  In terms of presentation and visual spectacle, we don’t see any difference between BibleMan and Hellboy.  Hellboy, in fact, is a superhero who fights against ultimate darkness.  He doesn’t quote Scripture — actually, he’s got an attitude problem, but the movie looks down upon him for this — but he does grind down his horns to fit in better with other people.  And he likes kittens.  So, actually, we felt like Hellboy presented the good v. evil battle in much clearer terms than the episode of BibleMan we saw.  The bad guys in Hellboy are Rasputin and a couple of freakish Nazis, and they didn’t parade around the set singing Frank Sinatra.  They were genuinely bad.  They didn’t have a problem with killing people and bringing about the end of the world, and for Hellboy, those are pretty terrible things.

Now this is not a praise in Hellboy’s favor. Let us explain.  What was good about Hellboy, like other Guillermo Del Toro movies, is that it’s visually outstanding.  Del Toro is like Spielberg on steroids.  In fact, Spielberg hasn’t been able to figure out how to make CGI look really good, while Del Toro is a master.  (This means that Del Toro’s version of The Hobbit, unlike the recent, watered-down Narnia movies, could be very good.)

But Del Toro is too much like Spielberg in that he’s given over to hokeyness about spiritual matters while pretending to be serious.  There’s lots of humor in Hellboy, but it’s directed at the superhero and his relationships, and not at the inherent structure of the comical plot, which is taken entirely seriously.  Nazis opening dimensional portals that pull in giant slimy monsters from space?  A devil character and his fish-faced sidekick trying to defeat the Ograd Jahad from the seventh dimension?  This is the kind of stuff that needs to be satirized, not used as if it contains a teeny-tiny possibility of being true.

Like Spielberg, Del Toro is quick to exploit religion for the sake of spectacle. Religious iconography dominates a movie that pits sacred icons against occult practices.  In the real world, this would be serious business.  In a Hollywood flick, it’s an action-packed two hours of fun.   For example, one character wears a relic from the Vatican to ward off hellhounds.  To give another example, the object that defeats the Ograd Jahad (the bad guys) is a rosary.  In the final moments, ready to give himself up to the bad guys, Hellboy accidentally touches a cross, which restores his “goodness.”  Here, sacred icons win out against the occult.

To us, this stuff is not about Christian witness or the positive portrayal of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.  It’s fundamentally all about being entertained by what’s on-screen.  The credits roll afterward, reality kicks back into gear, and for most folks, the spectacle has done its job to degrade matters that shouldn’t be taken so lightly in the real world.

We think some people take movies like Hellboy too seriously, when in fact a movie like this exploits religious symbolism because that symbolism is a kind of visual language that almost everybody understands.  It then repackages religion in a comicbook movie about a superhero devil character who must combat Nazis and mythical creatures.  The whole point is the spectacle, not the potential “religious message.”

In that sense, religion is reduced to a lame sideshow for entertainment purposes.  In contrast, the Bible describes the cosmic scope of the contest between religious worldviews as something of ultimate importance.  That’s the point of the First Commandment. You won’t see that contest given much meaningful treatment in any modern movie.

Entertainment: 6.5

Intelligence: 5 (for everything but the plot)

Morality: 4

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

Curse those relentless advertising blitzes! If only we hadn’t seen sidebar ads, movie trailers, and pre-release promo articles. If only we hadn’t seen Harrison Ford go on The Today Show, The Tonight Show, and all the shows in between. If only Indiana Jones hadn’t been a part of our entire lives — as a movie icon, as video games, as action figures. But it all worked well as a form of external motivation (or mind-control?) — we were compelled to go to the theater and pony up our $15 for two hours of escape. So did everyone else, judging by the crowd size. In our midwestern locale, the factory workers and farmers crowded into a plush theater to soak in another cultural production from Hollywood. No one blinked at the horror movie previews, and many laughed at the part in the Get Smart preview where a man gets smashed by a bus traveling at 60 mph. (In fact, the people behind us cackled at every punch and crotch shot, leaving us to wonder what kind of jollies Grand Theft Auto gives them.) It reminded us of the bit in 1984, when Winston Smith attends a movie.

But to this movie. The narrative formula is the same as the other three movies, but here, Steven Spielberg unexpectedly combines his two favorite topics: the dysfunctional nuclear family and aliens. Aliens here take the place of God, whose “power” was channeled in the other Indiana Jones movies to destroy curious Nazis. So now, thankfully, aliens get to play the part of the goofy higher power.  They look ridiculous doing so.

Meanwhile, the bad guys that Dr. Jones confronts are Russians. They not only anti-family, disrupting the Jones family’s unexpected reunion, but they also invade the United States. The movie, weirdly enough, subtly derides what popular culture now imagines as the right-wing politics of the 1950s, while fully embracing the possibilities of the Red Scare in order to make the plot move forward. But who can blame Spielberg and Lucas for cashing in on the fear of terrorists while at the same time pandering to their liberal buddies?  Just as with previous Indiana Jones movies’ dumb depiction of supernatural power, this movie has a rather dumb depiction of politics and the 1950s.  Thankfully, as usual, Jones himself stays out of it all.

But this Jones movie, like the others, is really about style and action. You get what you pay for: extended action sequences and Jones’ cool hat. Our one problem with this is that the movie has plenty of CGI effects, which look unreal and give the movie a video game feel. We still like sets, makeup, props, puppets, and stuntmen. Give us not a computer drawing; give us instead something concrete and real.

But — and this may be the movie series’ only redeeming quality — Jones is a laconic hero, who loves both the pursuit of truth and a good, necessary fistfight. No manicures for him. Just his brains, his fists, and a whip.  He is a modern-day rarity: a grown-up Boy Scout.

Entertainment: 10

Intelligence:1

Morality: 7 (for two grotesque deaths and unnecessary taboo words sprinkled in to up the rating to PG-13)

I Am Legend

I Am Legend has one of the most inexplicable titles we’ve ever seen. To us it signifies a vainglorious boast uttered by some modern-day monomaniac — a rapper, a president, a talking head — which runs counter to the ethos the movie’s trying to exude. A better title would’ve been Robinson Crusoe Vs. Rabid Cartoon Vampires.

Yes, that’s a B-movie title, which I Am Legend so desperately wants to be. You can’t be a B-movie when you contain millions of dollars of CGI graphics, but the ultra-fake lions in this movie are just as hokey as the lion in The Wizard of Oz. This story screams for either campy treatment or a visually scaled-down version. Essentially Will Smith — a doctor, a military officer, an athlete, a stunt-car driver (And what can’t he do? He even has Shrek memorized) — is the last man left in New York City after a proposed cure-for-cancer turns into a virus that creates rabid vampires out of almost all human beings. So Smith scours the city during the day, desperate and lonely, and works on viral antidotes in his basement laboratory. He might even be the last person on earth, but if he were, this wouldn’t be an expensive Hollywood production. Anyway, Smith’s plight is vastly overshadowed by the empty NYC landscape, now silent and organic. The movie repeatedly tries to awe us with this emptiness, but after 20 minutes of it you start to get Monty Python’s dictum in your head: “Get on with it!” It might’ve been more interesting to scale back on the millions spent to create this landscape, and just shoot the movie in empty parking garages and apartment buildings, which would just as effectively tell the story but might create a better feel of what it wants to say. But, we suppose, you have to spend millions to make millions.

So at some point Smith has to battle these rabid cartoon vampires, otherwise we wouldn’t have a movie. The problem is that he’s lost his faith. Now we all know that you can’t battle rabid cartoon vampires while being an atheist, of course, so the movie tells a brief backstory about his family. In that backstory, Smith and family pray to the “Lord.” This is later used to effect when Smith realizes he’s on a mission from “God,” seeing a prophetic signal in a scene that badly rips off a host of other movies with prophetic signals. Thus the day is saved, the world is saved, and the rabid cartoon vampires go home with yet another loss. (Give it up, guys. You’re the Washington Generals of Hollywood.)

Now forgive us for a tinge of cynicism, but when movies throw us characters that mention “God” and “Lord,” we get slightly suspicious. Ours is an age of full-blown pluralism and ecumenism. References to God tend to be vague and malleable. What one movie watcher takes as a Christian prayer, another takes as a Hari Krishna utterance. (Remember George Harrison’s “My Sweet Lord”?) Deists and Mormons can join in with the God talk, and we all end up singing Bob Marley’s “Redemption Song” together. That’s what Will Smith basically tells us to do in his Marley-influenced speech about love and peace.

It’s not as if we demand that Jesus Christ’s name be uttered each time for clarity. But short of that, we’re aware that by mentioning the name of “god” once or twice, a movie’s casting as wide a net as possible. Gotta reach all peoples, because the market reaches all peoples, and you can’t alienate many peoples when you’re trying to make a buck. For that reason, expensive movies are as watered-down as campaign speeches. Just consider that before you declare that I Am Legend is the Coolest Christian Movie Ever.

Entertainment: 6

Intelligence: 0

Morality: 8