Blade Runner 2049: Boring Soulless Mediocre Atheist Christ Story

Decades after the original, a new blade runner is tasked to hunt down a replicant that was “miraculously” born. Such a birth would justify giving replicants “human dignity,” and thereby stop their slavery to humans.

The original cool movie concept of a hunter of A.I. robots becoming the hunted has turned into another sophomoric attempt to philosophize that bleeds contempt for the audience by delivering no real action and long boring 1980s camerawork that lasts a sleep-inducing 2 hours and 44 minutes.

I don’t even want to waste my time blogging on this, but if I do, then you don’t have to waste your time regretting watching it.

I had originally assumed Ridley Scott directed this, but he only exec produced it. So…

My God, when are these Hollywood “artistes” going to stop trying to subvert the Bible with atheist Christ stories and God hatred? I’m praying that Denis Villeneuve, the director, is doing this because he’s being bothered in his conscience as he faces his own mortality. But I fear a more cynical reality that he is just another filmmaker who thinks he’s being “deep” by adding religious themes he doesn’t even believe in to a story he’s trying to make profound.

What is the line between machine and humanity? Do our dreams constitute our reality?

It seems that this is the era where atheist propaganda movies have achieved the preachy mediocrity of Christian propaganda movies. Now, when they throw out “God’s Not Dead” and “Fireproof,” we can say, “Oh, yeah? What about Alien Covenant and Blade Runner 2049?” And Exodus: God’s and Kings? And Noah?

Give me the hearty paganism of Gladiator any day over this heartless soulless atheism. (It’s paganism is not ultimately satisfying either, but it connects more deeply with our universal hunger for transcendence in a way that BR 2048 cannot.)

Soullessness is Boring

First off, the very premise upon which the entire movie rests is the atheistic evolutionary fairy tale that “souls” or consciousness arises or grows out of material complexity. This is all the rage now in some brain science circles etc. They have no actual explanatory mechanism for this “miracle” of matter sprouting “soul,” they just believe it happens. It “self-organizes.” This is what’s called in science, “just so” stories, or “magical thinking.”

And they laugh at Christians?

Ironically, the movie still operates within a modernist paradigm of Greek dualism that argues that humans are “ghosts in machines.” The Gnostic version says it this way: “the body is a prisonhouse of the soul.” Be that as it may, it’s the same delusion of A.I. movies all over. There is some point at which machines and/or their programming become so complex that they sprout souls.

This is actually a reductionism that reduces spirit to properties of matter. They try to deny that and craft clever ways of “transcending” materiality, but they cannot do so. And we humans know this when we watch these stories. Which means that when such atheist premises are engaged in the course of “love stories” between robots and other such “dignifying” activities, the audience knows as they watch that it’s a contradiction. Even if they don’t know it intellectually, or they can’t put their finger on it, they can sense it as they watch. Robots and programs are not humans, and no amount of verisimilitude can change that. Verisimilitude is a means of deception. And I think the audience can sense that truth.

Now, here’s how the deception tries to mimic truth… Continue reading

Alien Covenant: Ridley Scott’s Christophobic Atheism

Alien: Covenant views like an atheist version of a bad Christian movie.

Look, I was a fan of the original Alien, as one of the best sci-fi horror films of all time. Although I can no longer watch it because it’s gimmick of slow build suspense doesn’t work any more. It’s no longer scary, it’s just boring. One dinner scene remains emblazoned on film history, I won’t deny that. But the film no longer stands up for me.

Not so with Aliens. Aliens is the only one that still works in the series. It is the classic that surpasses the original. But of course, it isn’t Ridley Scott, it’s James Cameron, a superior storyteller. But I digress.

The Devolution of Atheist Storytelling

It seems as Scott gets older, his hatred of God burns brighter. Which is not a wise thing, considering how close he is in age to his own demise. And the worse his films seem to get as well. It’s almost as if Scott’s filmmaking is an argument for the existence of God. The more you apply atheism to your storytelling, the more irrational and the less satisfying your storytelling is for the human spirit.

Gladiator (2000) was quite simply a masterpiece of filmmaking. But it was pagan. Okay, a pagan masterpiece. An inversion of the gladiator movies of the past from their Judeo-Christian context into a celebration of pagan “transcendence.” Not because Scott (or his atheist screenwriter, David Franzoni) believes in such silly things, of course, but simply as a mythical embrace of anything other than Christianity. All the persecution of Christians in that era was quite literally cut out of the story.

Hannibal (2001) was a mocking subversion of the Christ story that transformed the cannibalistic serial killer into a Christ figure and the “real villain” was a caricature of a fundamentalist Christian. Satan as hero, worthy of the Scorsese award for antichrist filmmaking. And just a stupid movie.

Kingdom of Heaven (2005), was a humanistic reduction of all religion as morally equivalent and reduced to conquest. Wait. No. Actually, it was the denigration of Christianity to Islam, since the Crusades were depicted without their context of defense against imperialist jihad, and since the Muslims were portrayed as being more noble in their culture than the Christians. The story is about a Christian knight after all, who loses his faith in the face of multicultural experience of the other. (once again, any enemy of Christianity seems to be this director’s friend, even if that enemy hates him and wants to enslave the world) The problem is that this movie is an epic that lacks transcendence, even the pagan transcendence of Gladiator, and therefore becomes uninspiring and forgettable.

Prometheus (2012) (another pagan myth) was the mind-numbingly boring attempt to make the ancient aliens theory look aesthetically acceptable. But it’s still just the ridiculous atheist fairy tale that the gods of religion come from aliens. And they laugh at Christians claiming we believe in ridiculous made-up myths! Oh, and don’t forget, in this one, Jesus Christ was an alien. Gotta love that shot of the artwork of an alien in a crucifixion pose. Just give us some aliens vs. humans, damn you!

The Counsellor (2013) an uninspiring piece of nihilistic trash. When you argue that there is no meaning or purpose in reality, is it any wonder, your stories become meaningless and without purpose?

The abominable Exodus: Gods and Kings (2014) displayed Scott’s apex of vile anger and contempt for the God of the Bible by reducing him to a tamper tantrum-throwing child, a figment of delusion—more a projection of Scott’s hypocritical atheist moralizing (since atheism claims there are no moral absolutes) than a nuanced understanding of complex deity and ancient sacred storytelling. They say your view of God is often a reflection of how you see your father. Well, I can only hope Scott will one day see beyond his own self-righteous hatred of daddy to find the grace that would actually give his hopeless life and absurd universe some meaning and purpose.

It Just Keeps Getting Worse

Now, Alien: Covenant carries on Scott’s legacy of Christophobic atheism. Continue reading

Can Atheists Make Good Bible Movies?

“The biggest source of evil is of course religion.”
Ridley Scott, Esquire Magazine

With the release of Exodus: Gods and Kings by atheist director Ridley Scott, the attacks on Christian viewers has begun again. Bigoted secular film reviewers, manipulable Millennials who try to be cool and other naïve Christians who want to be accepted by the culture are launching their fiery arrows at those who voice criticism of the movie and it’s atheist spin on the Biblical God.

Can’t an atheist retell a good sacred story with fresh insight or even fidelity to the original? Isn’t it bigoted of “believers” to demand that they alone are allowed to tell their own stories? Who says Jews, Christians and Muslims own their stories anyway?

As a professional storyteller on screen and in print, I can explain why those complaining religious viewers are not “nuts,” “bigots,” or as “petty” as their critics think they are.

Ad300x250-HollywoodWorldviewsFirst off, it’s not just about fidelity to petty historic or descriptive details. It’s about fidelity to the meaning of the story and its God. The monumentally successful The Passion of the Christ added a lot of creative license to the Biblical text. The difference between it and the abysmal failure, The Last Temptation of Christ, was that The Passion did not depict Jesus as a crazy delusionary lunatic. Duh.

Sacred stories require a higher value of fidelity to their original meaning by their very nature. “Sacred” means devotion to the divine or dedicated reverence. Yes, atheists, agnostics and other secularists can logically be consistent with a sacred story’s original intent and reproduce it accurately — if they want to.

The problem is that in actual practice, “non-believers” by definition do not believe in the sacred story. Therefore, they will by necessity rewrite the story through their own non-believing paradigm, whether more subtly (Exodus) or more explicitly (Noah). Most people know this as “spin.” News flash: Every storyteller spins according to their paradigm or worldview.

Think about it: Even if an atheist would want to be fair to a Biblical story, he will ultimately spin it through his worldview of atheism. Why wouldn’t he? If he believes the God of the story is a delusion, why in the world would you think he would do anything but spin that God story in a way that he understands its ultimate reality?

AtheistMeaning

Hotel Rwanda, The Pursuit of Happyness, Hardball, Pocahontas, Walk the Line, and now Unbroken. These are not Bible stories, but all of these movies are about people whose religious faith was central to their stories, yet it was left out or ignored. Why? Because non-believers don’t believe God is important to their meaning, so of course they pull it out, or spin it to their own humanistic understanding of religion as some kind of benevolent (at best) delusion that meets a need for saving ourselves. I’m not even suggesting this is malicious. It may be, but it doesn’t have to be.

To the Christian, this kind of humanistic self-salvation paradigm is precisely the Original Sin that is most offensive to them. And to spin God as merely a religious experience or vision (even a positive one) is to reduce an existent relational Creator into the creation of man’s imagination. This is more than offensive to Christianity, it is blasphemy, the subversion of the Biblical God.

I explain how atheists Aronofsky and Scott subverted God in their Biblical epics Noah and Exodus here (Aronofsky and Noah) and here (Scott and Exodus).

You wouldn’t want a homophobe telling the story of Harvey Milk, or a racist telling the story of Martin Luther King, would you? So why is it acceptable for an atheist to tell a sacred story about the God they hate or don’t believe exists?

I am not talking about anybody’s rights here. In our free society, anyone can tell any story they want and spin it any way they want. But if a studio wants to make a lot of money by appealing to the audience of a sacred story, why would they want to hire someone who hates or disbelieves the God of that sacred story, and will spin that deity as petty, vindictive and capricious?

Ad300x250-ScreenwrtgChristiansAssuming they also have qualifying skills of excellence in the craft, “believers” of a sacred story have the experience and understanding of the meaning and the God of that story to connect to that audience in a way that a secular or atheist storyteller will never want to do —as evidenced by Scott’s and Aronofsky’s contempt for their viewers.

Thus, the successes of The Passion, Heaven is For Real, Son of God, and yes, even all those poorly made Christian genre movies that make a ton of money.

Noah and Exodus: Gods and Kings could have made three times what they made at the box office if they had been made by someone who actually believed the God of those stories was not the distant, cruel, unloving, impersonal, delusionary religious experience that they depicted him to be.

I was quoted in this article about this topic here at Hollywood in Toto.

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Intelligent Discussion of Exodus: Gods and Kings – Godawa on Dead Reckoning TV

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If you remember, Mattson’s blog posts and my blog posts on Noah were the viral “go to” posts for deconstructing the Noah movie for its hideous gnostic earth worship and other subversive atheist storytelling elements.

Now, we discuss the latest monstrosity of atheist movie subversions of Biblical stories, Exodus: Gods and Kings.

Check it out here on YouTube.