4/10
A missed opportunity
29 September 2005
Warning: Spoilers
I'm an incorrigible skeptic and agnostic and was thus expecting to enjoy this film. After watching it, however, I honestly believe that I could have made a better documentary myself. Its arguments appear to have only four spurious sources (despite his being listed in the credits on IMDb I didn't see Richard Dawkins anywhere), it's edited together crudely with laughably amateurish computer effects, and it doesn't make even the slightest attempt to appear impartial. The narration is pervaded throughout with a sneering, almost adolescent anti-Christian sentiment, ruining any possibility that the film might actually change someone's mind as opposed to just preaching to the choir (i.e. me). Though there is some interesting discussion of the historicity of Jesus, the movie hits an unbearable snag when it begins to dwell heavily on the Christian school which the director attended as a child, an institution which apparently scarred him badly psychologically as it obsesses him to this day.

Though TGWWT obviously had a low budget, there was still an opportunity here to make an intelligent commentary on the highly questionable roots of Christianity. There's certainly a dearth of skeptically-minded religious documentaries on the market, and this film could have helped fill the void. Instead, the director chose to insult our intelligence with this piece of garbage, which in the end appears to be some sort of therapeutic exercise for him. It's too bad that his Christian upbringing traumatized him, but he needn't subject an audience to his coping mechanism.
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