Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed

There's a lot of hype surrounding Bill Maher's documentary Religulous. Say what you will about Maher or the film, it's very funny and even informative. Maher makes his feelings on religion very well known at the outset and this lends the film an easy sense of light humor. Ben Stein does no such thing in his vile "documentary" Expelled. Stein uses trickery and half-truths to convince people that he is just a proponent of intelligent design and how it is different from Creationism. Stein claims that professors are fired and their careers ruined just for daring to speak against Darwinism and mentioning Intelligent Design. Stein finally goes over the edge near the end of the film when he attempts to link Darwinism (not even mentioning the various types) to Nazism. Using Holocaust imagery to further poorly made propaganda is about as low as a human being can get, the connection is barely established and historically false.

Expelled starts out with Stein interviewing college professors who lost their jobs for mentioning Intelligent Design in the classroom. Stein goes around as an amiable boob (in the style of a Michael Moore) and interviews pro-Darwin scientists and pro-Intelligent Design professors and scientists. Expelled is presented in widescreen and has a number of mostly useless extras, including a message from Stein and some trailers. The best feature on the DVD is a few bonus music tracks from Andy Hunter. Hunter provided the score for the film and is well known in the electronic music field for some rousing trance tunes. He's deeply religious but scoring this film will probably do his career more harm than good. It exposes his stuff to a wider audience, but associating yourself with such a disturbing repugnant mess. should have given Hunter pause.

The awkwardly titled Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed is mostly a boring and one-sided rant against Evolution. It preaches understanding but has nothing of the sort on its feeble mind. At first the film is simply boring and unfunny, but towards the end it becomes something much worse. There's nothing amusing about trying to exploit a horrific tragedy to score some easy points with right-wing hosts (Rush Limbaugh loved the film, and CNN's Glenn Beck is quoted on the DVD cover) and an audience who already thinks that Creationism is the way to go. Stein has a lot of explaining to do for this vile piece of propaganda. The problem for Mr. Stein is will anyone take him seriously enough to even listen to his arguments.