Ben Stein’s Intelligent Adventure
By Kate Wright
Ben Stein’s new film EXPELLED: No Intelligence Allowed, is a documentary that appears to be about Intelligent Design and the shortcomings of Darwinism. The film is not just an exploration of the limitations of The Origin of Species, but a journey to uncover the mindset that Darwinism engendered among those with an agenda to replace traditional understandings of God with pure materialism.
But far from offering a weighty discourse on theories of monism, Stein delivers a pop culture MTV-style Road Film that has already reignited the Culture Wars, with a just-issued cease and desist letter from a group at Harvard. The Harvard letter claims that a clip in the film plagiarizes an “Inner Life of the Cell” animation, and possible further legal action could disrupt the opening of the film on April 18.
We enter Ben Stein’s argument through images of the building of the Berlin Wall. Using inter-cuts, upbeat music, original text, and exciting graphics, Ben creates his own music video genre, as he visits professors who were “expelled” from universities and think tanks for merely mentioning the words “Intelligent Design” in their work.