Perfectly adorable

A lot of fun.

Simple and well acted, it has tension enough to knot the stomach.

It really made me laugh, but for some moments I was tearing up because I could relate so much.

Pretty cinematography and impressive-looking interviews mask what is, at its heart, typical intelligent design propaganda. The main premise, that the fact that conditions on Earth allowed life to form is too unlikely to have occurred by chance, is simply wrong. Life evolved on Earth BECAUSE the conditions were good. Organic molecule abound in the universe, but its only here that they were able to gain a foothold and eventually evolve into humans. Specious reasoning is not a good basis for a documentary that purports to be scientific. Next, let's examine the two men primarily responsible for the film's content. Jay Richards does indeed hold a PhD, but it's in theology. He has no science degree. It's in Wikipedia. Look him up. Guillermo Gonzalez was denied tenure at Iowa State for his support of intelligent design. Not exactly neutral scientific opinions, are they? Other comments are cherry-picked to support the ID hypothesis, and some scientific information is presented in a misleading fashion. For example, the film states that the portion of the electro magnetic spectrum we call "visible light" is only a tiny portion of the overall spectrum, and its miraculously situated where we can see it! No mention is made of animals that can see outside the human visible light spectrum, nor is it said that if humans were able to see, say, in the ultraviolet, that we would call THAT "visible light" and the current visible spectrum something else. And again, visible light is useful to life on Earth BECAUSE we evolved to use it. Organisms that use other types of waves wouldn't last long on Earth. I could go on, but there's only so much room to refute all the deliberate misinformation in this film.Pleas, do yourself a favor and watch a REAL documentary on the origins of life. Real scientists don't need to make excuses or misinform. The truth is out there.

*** This comment may contain spoilers ***I won't go into all the details of why this simplistic movie is just another example of the Intelligent Design (ID) camp's attempt to mislead the relatively uneducated and those who may be desperate to believe in a personal god/creator. I'll just point readers to a couple of objective information sources and then mention only one or two general fallacies in the film that are typical of the ID movement's pseudo-scientific approach.First, the biggest and most overarching flaw is the simplistic reliance on the anthropic principle: that there must be a purposeful reason why we are here to observe and contemplate the universe. Basically, anthropic reasoning says that we are here because we're special (in the eyes of God?). Whereas a more scientific approach would say that we're special because we're here. (A subtle but crucial distinction.) I.e., we could just as easily not have been here; in which case this would all be moot.For more on the anthropic principle, just Google it and read a few of the more scientific descriptions. Secondly, the ID proponents take scraps of "evidence" very selectively and then just ignore the huge amount of counter evidence that goes against their view.A couple of examples of this are their assumption that all life forms in the universe must be based on the particular combination of conditions found on earth (atmospheric composition, temperature, amount of water, carbon-based life, etc.); and the misleading commentary on how the size and distance of the moon from the earth and sun are just right to allow a total eclipse of the sun. Re: the latter point, the ID folks seem either to ignore or not even be aware of the simple fact that the moon is gradually moving away from the earth's gravitational field. It used to be much closer to earth; and it will eventually escape the earth's gravitation altogether, leaving us with no moon whatsoever. That future situation may be extremely disruptive to life on earth (no tides, on which many organisms depend, as the movie itself points out), if not totally disastrous. Ironically, survival under those future circumstances will probably depend on successful evolution of species due to natural selection pressure. So much for "intelligent" design.There's a lot more I could say. But maybe this is enough to get some of the more critical, objective proponents at least to view the movie again with a more skeptical eye next time. If you really want to take a cold, hard look at the ID arguments vs. real science when it comes to evolution specifically, I suggest you read the excellent, objective book "Why Darwin Matters: The Case Against Intelligent Design" by Michael Shermer, who is famous for carefully and logically debunking lots of pseudo-science. Another excellent book is "Why Intelligent Design Fails" which also carefully dissects and debunks the ID arguments.And for more discussion about the "specialness" of our universe and how the laws of physics are tuned precisely to allow us to exist and observe it, read, in addition to the anthropic principle material, a book called "Before the Beginning" by Martin Rees, which discusses the concept of the "multiverse".Here is the key difference between the ID crowd and real science: while the latter try to remain objective and to derive and test theories based on evidence from the natural world, the former start with a religious belief about what they want to be true, and then use selective evidence and false logic to try to "prove" it. Unfortunately, those who do not have a strong education in science, logic, etc., can fall easy prey to such nonsense.

Yes, it is an intelligent design film and it makes no pretenses about it. If it were trying to be deceptive or misleading, it would not be named after the book, nor would it feature the author! Production value? It was non-profit. Read the label.Yes, it has an agenda. Films with an agenda are not a bad thing! Pro-evolution films push an atheist agenda. ID films push a creationist (though not necessarily Christian) agenda. Michael Moore films push an anti-Bush agenda. Get over it; the filmmakers hold beliefs. It's within in their right to showcase them. Go make your own "Case for Cro-Magnon" if it bothers you that much.And please use spell check before posting, kids. Most everything great about the film has been highlighted by other reviewers, so I won't parrot them. Some of the animations were repeated, and the music got a bit repetitive after a while. But I'm being nit picky. It was a great educational film, made by some very intelligent people.

This movie presents quite a lot of real science, and leaves it to the viewer to draw a conclusion, regarding whether the immensely precise laws of physics, and how they combine on the Earth to allow us to live, are best explained by intelligent design OR by one of the several theories of evolution.For one scientific point (among many), evolution cannot explain how the multiple components of the eye, which must make electro-chemical changes in picoseconds, could have evolved by minor or major mutations, since the creature is blind IF any one of those components is not present or does not function exactly as it has to. If the creature is blind, it will die, since it cannot get help to eat from another of its own kind, because they would ALL be blind, therefore that species would all die off. Even Darwin admitted that the eye cannot be explained by evolution. We now know much more about how fantastic the components of the eye are, and evolution STILL does not have an explanation for the eye. Intelligent design is the best explanation for the eye.There are a number of other irreducibly complex structures like the eye, as well as the incredibly complex electro-chemical factory in every cell, and NONE of these can be explained by evolution.Darwin also admitted that the fossil record does not support evolution; it actually supports intelligent design; but he thought that fossils of "intermediate" species would be found. With millions more fossils now found, NONE of them is an intermediate species; there are no "missing links".I suggest that, with an open mind, seeking the truth, you read "The Case for a Creator", in which a journalist talks with the experts on microbiology, astrophysics, and other sciences, and carefully examines arguments for both evolution and intelligent design.