‘Radiohead was the first band to say yes to the project’ said professor Lawrence Krauss during the Q&A after the screening of ‘The Unbelievers’ on Friday night. Sure, you’re gonna say I am trying very hard to make a connection to music while writing about a movie starring evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins and theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss! But not really, music is an important part of the film, not only you hear Radiohead (‘I might be wrong’ and a few other songs), R.E.M. (‘Orange Crush’), Ratatat (‘Gettysburg’), Fit for Rivals, but writer/director/producer Gus Holwerda is a member (with his brother Luke) of the alternative rock band Smokescreen, whose music provides most of the film’s soundtrack!
But beside this obvious connection, there is also another very essential aspect of the documentary which follows the two scientists giving lectures around the world to raise awareness on the subjects of reason, skepticism, and rational thinking. They are obviously rock stars, you should have seen the fans asking for autographs to Krauss after the screening! And the approach of the documentary makers was pretty much that of people following a rock’ n’ roll band touring around the globe. ‘We were fan boys’ admitted the Holwerda brothers during the Q&A, and it shows.
During the 77 minutes, you will not get big clashes between Dawkins or Krauss and religious authorities – although there’s a bit of this when Dawkins accepts to debate with the Archbishop of Sidney on TV – but rather you will see the two scientist talking to their choir during the large 2012 Global Atheist Convention in Australia or the 2012 Rally for Reason in Washington D.C. where 30,000 people showed up. If you want stormy debates just type their names in a YouTube search, there are plenty online! This wasn’t what this film was aiming for, rather it is an homage to their perseverance, intelligence and passion for science and reason.
But if I had only one sentence to sell the movie, I would say it is well-paced, not boring for a second and very funny! I already knew about Dawkins’ British humor, but Krauss is really a riot! I totally enjoyed his constant joking tone and laid-back attitude, even when facing the most fundamentalist Muslim crowd for a debate that was only advertised to the Muslim community, ‘I have a rule if there’s less than 5 people, we just go for coffee’, he says jokingly. At one point of the movie, you also see him giggling at his iPhone, visibly very happy that Miley Cyrus has tweeted, followed by the word ‘beautiful’, one of his famous sentences ‘So, forget Jesus. The stars died so that you could be here today’. The movie works best when the two men are debating together, as the chemistry (no pun intended) between the distinguish Oxford professor wearing colorful ties and the witty Arizona State University professor wearing converse shoes and Star Trek t-shirts is real.
The movie starts and ends with numerous Hollywood stars, actors and filmmakers (Woody Allen, Ricky Gervais, Sarah Silverman, Cameron Diaz, Bill Pullman, Werner Herzog, Tim Minchin,…), scientists (Stephen Hawkins) and writers (Cormac McCarthy) speaking about the value of promoting rational thinking and science, and denouncing the shortcoming of religion, and Gus Holwerda has promised many others in the bonus section coming with the future DVD release! Woody Allen opens the film with one of his famous quotes ‘Everyone knows the same truth, and our lives consist of how we choose to distort it’, and this gives right away the tone. Dawkins and Kraus definitively are fighting against this constant distortion that religion brings into our life.
Now, just like the Holwerda brothers and probably 99% of the people attending their lectures, I was already a fan of both men, I listen to/read them all the time and greatly admire their witty sense of humor and their intelligent choice of words to answer the most crucial questions about the origin of humanity (Dawkins) or the universe (Krauss). I must say they didn’t have to convince me! So, if you are like me, you will greatly enjoy the movie because you will listen to some of the best of these two men, expressing important ideas better than you will ever be able to, because they are experts, and not authorities as Krauss says at the beginning, of the movie, ‘there are no authorities in science, only experts’.
Now if you aren’t a fan, or worst if you are religious, I can’t predict how you are gonna receive the film, are you going to be offended? May be, but you shouldn’t, it’s not a religion-bashing movie, it’s a pro-science and pro-knowledge movie,… ‘Science shouldn’t make us uncomfortable’ says Krauss. But if you are offended, you haven’t been following very closely the rise of the new atheist movement, and its direct criticism of religion, an unprecedented attitude in the world of science. In 2013, religion has remained one of these taboo and untouchable subjects, even for many scientists, but Krauss and Dawkins declare that nothing should be not subject to criticism, and this new and bold attitude got them an endless series of hatred and harsh (and totally unfair) criticism (‘you should see my emails’ says Krauss). People can’t deal with the fact that science has relegated God to a God of the gaps (of knowledge), a lazy solution and even to the unnecessary hypothesis, since modern science ‘gives God nothing to do’. In the movie, the refutation of a god-like entity is always justified by science and reason with the intervention of other scientists, philosophers and even magicians (Sam Harris, Dan Dennett, James Randi, Penn Jillette) and I wonder what the film could have been with the addition of late great Christopher Hitchens to whom the movie is dedicated: Hitchens used to say he was an anti theist since he wouldn’t live in a universe with God, comparing God to a tyrannical authority and heaven to a sort of celestial North Korea.
In a society where atheists were ranked as trustworthy as rapists in a recent poll, where a 30,000 people gathering on the Washington mall for the Rally for Reason wasn’t even covered by the medias, it’s very important that such a documentary was made about these two outspoken scientists, two truth seekers in awe by the beauty of science and the complexity of nature, and communicating it with humor and passion. So thank you Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood, since after the approval of the use of Radiohead’s music for the movie was made public, many musicians followed. It’s very important that Radiohead, R.E.M. or Woody Allen and Werner Herzog (who was present at the screening) back up this movie.
We live during amazing times when God has never been so relevant because of the recrudescence of religious extremists in the US and abroad and when God has never been so irrelevant because of advancement in science. But as Dawkins is alluding to at one point, religion, like a wounded beast, may be doing its last stroke.
