The reviews are in despite the fact that critics screenings were almost non-existent. I am going this afternoon. I cant wait.
From the New York Times:
Mixing physical apples and metaphysical oranges at every turn “Expelled” is an unprincipled propaganda piece that insults believers and nonbelievers alike. In its fudging, eliding and refusal to define terms, the movie proves that the only expulsion here is of reason itself.
Salt Lake Tribune:
While many right-wingers decried Michael Moore for playing fast-and-loose with the facts in his documentaries, apparently other conservatives said, "Hey, if he can do it, so can we."
And, lo, there appeared "Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed," a slick but intellectually dishonest documentary that mounts an argument for so-called "intelligent design."
Pioneer Press:
It is fatuous, for instance, to denounce Darwin based on the way Adolf Hitler misinterpreted his work, juvenile to use animation to make science look as stupid as possible and dangerously misguided to suggest that Planned Parenthood is a hellish bastion of eugenics. Even more pointless is a lengthy sequence in which Stein tut-tuts as he tours a facility where Nazis once imprisoned and murdered the handicapped. Sure, the images are horrifying, but they have nothing to do with the film's subject.
Roanoke Time:
The film would carry greater weight, however, if someone had explained those gaps. Even better, it would be nice if, at some point in the film, Stein had suspended his agenda for the few moments it would take to define intelligent design.
Fox12 Idaho
Nampa, Idaho -- Friday will mark one of Hollywood's biggest openings for a documentary film in the United States -- and Boise, Nampa and Meridian will be three of the 1,000 locations screening the movie.
In this film funnyman Ben Stein is examining one of the most widely debated topics -- Darwinism verse intelligent design. A far cry from his legendary characters of the "dry eye guy" and the monotone teacher in "Ferris Bueller's Day Off", Stein is wearing a different hat these days. He is the brains behind the new documentary film "Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed". It's two years worth of research dissecting the long debated Darwin verse intelligent design debate and suggests that there is more out there than what he calls the "Darwinian machine".
Christian Post
“Expelled” makes a strong case for challenging the existing academic status quo and demanding that the free exchange of ideas, so highly-valued in other areas of academic inquiry, be extended to the origins of life debate. Stein documents the close-minded treatment many scientists give these new evidences for design.
Baptist Press
Land: 'Expelled' a must-see movie
(do you think this line will be used in advertisements?)
National Review:
In the end, the film isn’t really about intelligent design as much as about a relentless attack on an authentically free inquiry. As Ben Stein points out, “Freedom of inquiry has been greatly compromised, and this is not only anti-American, it’s anti-science. It’s anti-the whole concept of learning.”
Crosswalk.com (How can I pray for you?)
Ben Stein’s new movie called Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed opens today in theaters across America. Because the movie dares to challenges the prevailing Darwinian orthodoxy that has a stranglehold on American education, it has already generated a great deal of discussion in the blogosphere. Predictably, the major newspapers and liberal critics don’t like it, which to me is a good reason to go and check it out for yourself. You don’t have to agree with everything you see in the movie. I don’t doubt its major premise–that scientists and academics who question (or even appear to question) evolutionary tenets risk losing their jobs and their chance at career advancement. That’s not exactly big news, given how completely the evolutionary mindset has captured the elites in our society. In the latter half of the movie (which I have not seen) Ben Stein demonstrates the necessary connection between a purely secular worldview and many of the social evils of our day. This will no doubt infuriate many of the critics but so be it. Ideas have consequences.
Baltimore Sun
Someday perhaps it will be possible to look back on Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed as a relic and reminder of the rhetorical logic employed during the era of George W. Bush. Until then, it should be seen simply as a tiresome ideological bludgeon, an attempt to deceive audiences into believing it is one thing when it is, in fact, quite another.
AND MY ABSOLUTE FAVORITE (other than the praise endorsement by the Idaho Values Alliance report still on the front page of Fox 12 Boise at
http://www.ktrv.com/ Even non believers should check it out because the news chick - while she cant read news - makes up for it by being cute) is the Discovery Institute - who hawks a book about the devil on the front page of their website:
This film is going to be a classic and there is nothing the fulminating opposition can do about it. (In recent days they even resorted to threatening lawsuits, just confirming their growing reputation for ill-liberal spite.)
There is no way that we, for our part, could have persuaded the evangelizing atheists in science--that is, the big guns of Darwinism--to let their true personalities appear in front of a camera so people actually could witness their furious, unreasoning contempt.
Expelled has done that. Hearing and seeing Richard Dawkins criticize the disingenuous and propagandistic approach of the National Center for Science Education (a part of the film the Darwinists simply do not want to acknowledge in public, let alone discuss) was worth it all for me. And that was before Dawkins went on to explain the space alien theory of life's origin that Carl Sagan, Francis Crick and many other Darwinians promote as their own creation story. (This theory is real science, right, Richard? Testable, falsifiable, based on evidence you have researched?)