Wonderful Movie

Simply A Masterpiece

If you don't like this, we can't be friends.

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

For a film covering such curious individuals as Dawkins and Krauss, it doesn't actually seem that curious about anything other than its very myopic perspective: that science cancels out religion. Irritated and irritating.

The subject matter is quite interesting and there are some very good statements from people in the documentary. Learned something about the issues in an entertaining way. Some really dynamite quotes. Learned that Cameron Diaz is a freethinker, so I actually have more respect for her as an individual, although I still think she's not much of an actor. Now the bad stuff. It's a very "jerky" production with lots of jump cuts, fast forwards and a lot of filler of cityscapes, etc. But the worst part of it for me was the sound quality. For some reason, almost throughout the film there was a music accompaniment that was very intrusive. For instance a recording of REM's "Orange Crush" playing for quite a while, with the volume going up and down. This was when one of the subjects was speaking, and when his volume went up, so did REM's. I think they used some type of "normalization" software that adjusted the music volume to the general volume of the speaker. Very distracting, and really poor soundperson work. BTW, there are some (thankfully brief) Woody Allen interviews (along with many others) at the end and the beginning. But you really shouldn't be listing him as one of the actors or featured persons in your description, any more than you should list Cameron Diaz, Penn Gillette or Stephen Hawking. They all have some statements in here, but Woodys is no more a featured item than the others.

I'm a big fan of Dawkins and Krauss, but I was somewhat disappointed by this offering. It was self-aggrandizing, a lot of shots of them driving around in fancy cars. I think they would do better to avoid belittling the intelligence of their adversaries: it will lose converts. They need to realize that not everyone is lucky enough to be as smart as they are or have gotten their level of education. Most people respond better to emotional appeals than to pure reason, especially in crowds. Maybe they were trying to play on that, but especially Dawkins came off as narcissistic.I was looking forward to seeing the debates, but they just cut off their opponents at the beginning. Not very sporting. Come on, "why" is not a stupid question!That said, I believe that cosmology definitely provides a better answer than organized religion: it has predictive power, and it provides a sense of urgency for getting off the planet. I'm not a cosmologist, but my impression is that the best evidence for the Big Bang is that Hubble observed the universe to be expanding in all directions. Running this backwards, common sense dictates there would have been a Big Bang. Why didn't they once say this? Why just state "Big Bang is fact", "evolution is fact"?My sentiment is that these guys come off as being dogmatic themselves--about the status quo of science. I'm willing to bet there are general relativity solutions out there that don't posit a Big Bang that perhaps also involve a universe that seems to expand, maybe depending on where you are in it. Or solutions that don't involve an end of the universe. Maybe that could explain dark matter/dark energy? Just a thought. I don't think that the Big Bang has been proved as a mathematical necessity within relativity, or that all physical arguments to the contrary have been exhausted. Even less so for an end of the universe. Even general relativity is not the final word in physical theory.It's important to keep in mind that physics has its limitations. Computer science has allowed us to prove that there are questions which are undecidable--which cannot be answered. The classification of four-dimensional spaces, if I remember correctly, is one of those questions. That probably also applies to relativistic space times, a subset of the 4d spaces. If so, I'm betting the Big Bang debate is far from being settled.I don't find anything endearing or heartwarming about the universe needing to have an end. So indeed we should be trying to find a way out of that. Maybe one possibility, even if the universe does have an end, is to use a black hole's gravity to make OUR sense of time seem infinite, even if a farther-away observer would see an end in finite time.

If this film tried to argue its position, i wouldn't have rated it so lowly. Unfortunately it doesn't, it is only a propaganda piece. It uses emotional arguments and the cult of celebrity in attempt to endorse a belief system. Meanwhile, one of the stars of the film in Richard Dawkins runs scared from open intellectual debate with Christian apologist William Lane Craig. This is a scientist who claims to be an advocate of reason who chooses, rather than debate his position in open forum, to instead use the cult of celebrity to convince the human cattle that his belief system is the one and only true belief system, and all others are wrong.If your intellectual capacity has run so dry that celebrity endorsement can convince you of any belief system (ie atheism), this film is for you. For those of a more critical nature, this film is offensive.