Wednesday, October 26, 2005

Movie Review of "What the bleep do we know?"

A torture weapon to tranquilize, annoy and destroy your brain cells.
Rated: C for Completely avoidable.

This movie came with high recommendation from many friends and finally I had the misfortune of watching this sleep inducing and possibly brain damaging pseudoscience documentary. The theme of the movie is, ‘you can change the world by the power of thought’. Some of you may say, ‘so what’s wrong with that? A change in attitude could indeed be life changing’. This movie says more than that and that’s where I start getting pissed off. The disgusting manipulation of science to make data fit their theories is where the rabbit hole to bull-shit begins.
This movie is made to initiate cult following for the Ramtha institute of “enlightenment”. Let me tell you a little bit more about this institute so that you are aware of where all these scientific “experts” and “facts” presented in the movie are coming from. Ramtha institute was started by J.Z Knight, who claims to communicate with a 35000-year-old spirit Ramtha (a warrior from Atlantis). All the other “experts” are affiliated with this institute or other universities, which conduct studies that don’t follow any scientific method.
Many people don’t know what to make of the movie because they may not know enough about quantum theories and neurobiology to make a fair judgment. That’s what the moviemakers count on, you giving them the benefit of doubt.
Think about it though. Can you really change the crystal structure of water by your thoughts? The study done by Masaru Emoto called ‘messages in water’ is anything but science. The crystal structures shown in the movie were a biased subset. The researcher knew what word the bottle was labeled with so it was easy for him to pick out crystals that matched the description. A beautiful crystal for love and an ugly one for hate. I’d like to see Mr. Emoto get those results without knowing what word the bottle was labeled with.
Aside from the crappy movie content, the whole attempt at making the documentary into a movie was a complete failure.
Here are a few reviews of the movie that I enjoyed reading:
BBC review:Less Stephen Hawkings, more Oprah Winfrey
Short funny review
Very detailed review on the factual inaccuracies of the movie

2 comments:

CogitoErgoConfusum said...

lol @ 'Rated C'...:)

I love scathing reviews...I wish you'd continued on for a li'l while longer...:D

Crystal Blur said...

SSM,
I didn't read any reviews b4 I watched the movie, I just watched it based of ppl's recos. What the bleep did I know?

Cogster,
I curtailed it to a short review bcoz I had some links to hilarious reviews both short and long. I felt like I would be paraphrasing those reviews, so I gave links to them after putting my 2 cents in.

Crys :)