Religulous (2008)

Later the selfsame year that Ben Stein released Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, stand-up comedian Bill Maher threw his own documentary into the arena. In the interest of fairness, this too is not a particularly intellectual piece, based almost entirely upon opinion and rhetoric. Indeed, Maher commits exactly the same intellectual crime as Stein in that he used a false title, A Spiritual Journey, to obtain interviews with some of the interviewees in the film. For true integrity, Maher should have openly asked these people to contribute their views to his project, and if they refused when openly and honestly offered, report that in his documentary and recognise it as a weakness that they are unwilling to throw their views into discussion. The cutting of the interviews also leads me to think that he may not necessarily be misrepresenting people's views, but certainly emphasising parts for comedic effect. This is not the right way to make an informative documentary. However, Maher's documentary is far and away the more enjoyable, mainly due to Maher's own charisma and proficiency as a comedian, not to mention his honesty about his own views (unlike Stein). His film is definitely funnier, despite its scientific or philosophical deficiency. Maher also manages to talk to the more radical aspects of the various faiths he treats with a friendly enough disposition to speak remarkably frankly (though his travelling monologues and cutaway slide shows are far more caustic). This frank and funny content is utterly at odds with the final section, in which Maher issues his call to wake up to the crises facing the world, and how we need to wake up from our religious infancy, accompanied by provocative (some might say exploitative) images of nuclear explosions and large-scale pollution, a technique as dubious as when Stein overlays his film with near-constant Communist or Holocaust imagery. Again, personal opinion plays a large role, but Maher's documentary is more competently constructed and simply more entertaining, though they share a similar intellectual content.


Not pictured: evidential backing.