So I had to watch a complete pseudoscientific turd of a movie for my religion class and then write a paper on it. I did not appreciate this. So I wrote a paper explaining its awfulness. You can watch the movie itself and judge whether it deserves the bile I spill about it here. Now I wait and see what my grade will be, because it was kind of my final.
What the Bleep Do We Know
As strongly as you appeared to enjoy this movie, Mr. C___, I disagreed with many of the concepts that it brought up. I have issues with it both philosophically and scientifically. The entire movie was so New Age that I am genuinely surprised it did not mention the healing power of crystals. It abuses the science of quantum physics and implies that we, as human beings, has control over the most basic forces of the universe, rather than being the end product of those forces.
Just as an example, one of my issues with the science of the movie is with the experiment with water crystallization. A quick Google search tells me that the scientist responsible for that study, one Masaru Emoto, has been castigated by the scientific community for failing to be properly objective and for allowing human error to influence his work. Harriet Hall, a physician who writes for the Skeptical Enquirer, wrote that it was “hard to see how anyone could mistake [the water crystallization experiment] for science.” Mr. Emoto’s peers in the scientific community report that the entire experiment was bunk and failed to be scientifically responsible in any way, yet the movie reports everything found in his study as gospel truth. It is difficult, with such a fundamental lack of responsibility, to take seriously anything else the movie says. Furthermore, the claim it makes about crime going down in DC when people meditated was false. The rates of violent crime and murder actually went up. The movie blatantly lies.
I have similar issues on the philosophical side of the movie. By confusing quantum physics with philosophy, it misrepresents both. It is one thing to posit that God is present in the movements of quantum particles – should God be truly present in the world, then She would be present in everything and therefore present in quantum motion by default. It is another thing entirely to suggest that simply by thinking positively we can affect the crystallization of water, or that by thinking really hard we can change our location in the quantum universe, or that by having some sort of revelation we can change our entire brain chemistry and no longer need such trivialities as antidepressant medication. That’s when this movie crosses the line from simply laughably wrong to both physically and philosophically dangerous. It is physically dangerous because people are prescribed anti-depressants for a reason – to assume one day simply because they are feeling better that they no longer need the medicine will result in them crashing into a depressive state again and all the difficulties that caused originally. It is philosophically dangerous because it implies that anyone who is unhappy deserves to be so, because they obviously aren’t trying hard enough. Not only is it untrue, but it is also the last thing that a depressed person needs to hear.
Finally, I have issues with the creators themselves. All three of the credited creators, William Arntz, Betsy Chasse, and Mark Vicente, are students of the Ramtha School of Enlightenment, whose founder has proudly declared ‘F*** you, Catholics!” to a cheering audience of her students. The school itself supposedly teaches its students to be able to access their latent mental abilities, including psychokinesis, telepathy, and clairvoyance. Knowing their background, it is not difficult to see the extremely strong influence that this less-than-legitimate school has had on the creators of the film, and how it has colored their worldviews, and therefore it is extremely hard to take anything they suggest seriously. I do not believe in the tenets of Scientology, despite the fact that the founder claims it was revealed to him by a higher being – I see no reason to believe the claims the followers of someone whose claim to truth is based on the exact same reasoning.
Basically, I could not stand this movie. It insulted my intelligence; it was sensationalist, and it broke the trust of the viewers by lying to them, both directly and through omission. I cannot take anything this movie claimed seriously, because the rare times something based in actual truth was mentioned, it was falsely rationalized. There was nothing admirable about it, not even cinematically. The only thing I learned was that it is possible for even the most incorrect of pseudoscience to seem convincing if portrayed correctly, and that I should therefore always research a claim before I believe it, which is honestly something I should have learned a while ago. I apologize for my wholly negative opinion of the work, Mr. C___, but the film deserves it.
