First things first: the film itself. I it today and thought that it was pretty good for a documentary. It could have been done better, but all in all it was well put together and entertaining.
Now about the visceral overreaction to the film: I seriously question how many of the people giving it 1-star ratings have actually seen it. It seems to me that it's very likely people read a synopsis or a review and launched into action to demonize the film. I conclude this because many of the 1-star posts are just anti-creationist rants, or comment on things that weren't even in the film, or obvious misrepresentations of the film, such as:
* "This film attempts to blame Hitler's evil on the development of one of the most brilliant scientific discoveries in the past several centuries." - This is something I've seen in several posts and it's just plain false... the film even went so far as to explicitly state that there's no suggestion that the theory of evolution led to Hitler's evil or the Holocaust. They said that it paved the way for to the notion of eugenics, which was the philosophical foundation for the holocaust.
* Numerous references to interspersed stock footage of Nazis. Anyone with a fair grasp of history (and who has actually seen the film) knows that the stock footage was from Communist Eastern Europe and its entire point was to portray the erection of the Berlin Wall
* "The movie never makes a decent case for showing evolution as false" * "and contains not a single original argument for Intelligent Design" The film didn't contain ANY arguments for ID or AGAINST evolution... it wasn't even positioned as an argument in favor of ID. The whole discussion was about the absolute anathema that discussion of ID is in the scientific community.
If this is true, and there are a fair number of people rating the film as a 1 having never seen it (which seems likely... read the posts), then this only serves to prove Ben Stein's case: there is an institutional, and emotional stonewalling of any discussion of ID. An attempt to sink a film with horrid ratings just because you don't like the subject points to an unbelievably visceral zealotry.
By all means, watch the film with skepticism and a grain of salt... but be far more skeptical of the lopsided ratings given to this film.
Now about the visceral overreaction to the film: I seriously question how many of the people giving it 1-star ratings have actually seen it. It seems to me that it's very likely people read a synopsis or a review and launched into action to demonize the film. I conclude this because many of the 1-star posts are just anti-creationist rants, or comment on things that weren't even in the film, or obvious misrepresentations of the film, such as:
* "This film attempts to blame Hitler's evil on the development of one of the most brilliant scientific discoveries in the past several centuries." - This is something I've seen in several posts and it's just plain false... the film even went so far as to explicitly state that there's no suggestion that the theory of evolution led to Hitler's evil or the Holocaust. They said that it paved the way for to the notion of eugenics, which was the philosophical foundation for the holocaust.
* Numerous references to interspersed stock footage of Nazis. Anyone with a fair grasp of history (and who has actually seen the film) knows that the stock footage was from Communist Eastern Europe and its entire point was to portray the erection of the Berlin Wall
* "The movie never makes a decent case for showing evolution as false" * "and contains not a single original argument for Intelligent Design" The film didn't contain ANY arguments for ID or AGAINST evolution... it wasn't even positioned as an argument in favor of ID. The whole discussion was about the absolute anathema that discussion of ID is in the scientific community.
If this is true, and there are a fair number of people rating the film as a 1 having never seen it (which seems likely... read the posts), then this only serves to prove Ben Stein's case: there is an institutional, and emotional stonewalling of any discussion of ID. An attempt to sink a film with horrid ratings just because you don't like the subject points to an unbelievably visceral zealotry.
By all means, watch the film with skepticism and a grain of salt... but be far more skeptical of the lopsided ratings given to this film.
