Movie Reviews

How often does this happen: so I'm watching this pretty bad movie called What the #$*! Do We Know!? (yes, the "#$*!" is part of it's official title; any other arrangement of nonsensical punctuation marks is incorrect) and I'm thinking, "Hmm, this movie is pretty bad, but it's talking about some very interesting things. I wish I was reading a textbook about those very interesting things right now, rather than watching this pretty bad movie".

That doesn't happen very often at all. What the #$*! Do We Know!? is a documentary, of sorts, about quantum physics. Kind of. Here's the gist of what I think the talking-heads in the film were talking about: Mankind used to be thoroughly spiritual, believing that our existence and our environment was created and controlled by some all-powerful being or force. The "modern" world, however, has moved away from that, with its focus on science, reason, cause-and-effect, etc. But science has been extraordinarily helpful to us, no doubt, as through its practices we've come to understand things that were once thought completely beyond our grasp (the atomic makeup of matter, for instance).

But where do atoms come from, and why do they behave the way they do? Is it possible that there is some even more pervasive fabric to our existence, even more "foundational" than atomic physics? The people interviewed in What the #$*! Do We Know!? believe so, and apparently there is some very real quantum science out there that might actually back them up. Perhaps, as seems to be the case put forward in this film, our super-advanced science may be on the verge directing us towards a new form of spirituality -- not in the form of any established religion that we're familiar with, but more of an understanding and appreciation of how something like our very thoughts can actually have an affect on the material world.

The film explains that the "material world", as we understand it, might actually be quite misleading (this is based on an old philosophical debate: because I am "trapped" within my own mind and experiences, so-to-speak, how do I know that anything outside of me is actually there, and is not just something "constructed" by my brain and interpreted as 'experience'?). Science now continues this argument by saying that because the brain operates on pulses of electricity, there really is no actual 'connection' between any physical world and our minds -- it's all just 'interpreted' by those mysterious and fleeting electrical pulses.

Considering that, the film seems to argue that one day, perhaps we will learn how to "free our minds" and control the traffic in our own personal electrical grids, thereby shedding entirely new light on what 'matter' actually is and how we interact with it.

It's pretty heady stuff, and I'm about 70% sure I only understood about 30% of what the film was trying to say. I found it all quite fascinating, though, especially the potential for a shift towards a new kind of science-based spirituality.

Too bad the movie itself sort of stunk. For some reason it was decided that there should be a special effects-laden "story" intertwined among the talking heads. It was some really awful thing about a depressed photographer tripping into some kind of Alice in Wonderland experience that only loosely connected with what the talking heads were talking about, and it was all done with sub-par computer animation.

And those talking heads were a questionable bunch, too. Some of them were apparently very legitimate scientists and scholars, while others have been revealed to be followers of the "Ramtha School of Enlightenment", a cult-ish group not too far-removed from Scientologists. In fact, one of the main talking-heads is apparently the god Ramtha himself, "channelled" (yes, it says that in the credits) by a middle-aged woman named J.Z. Knight (who is, coincidentally or not, the founder of the Ramtha School of Enlightenment).

Despite feeling that a lot of the 'facts' posited by the people in the film are probably nothing more than New Age hooey, I still found myself quite interested in a lot of what was said. But honestly, I would've preferred to read it out of a textbook than hear it in this pretty bad movie.