"Charles Darwin!" jokes Mathias Brucker, an Austrian friend (adopting the tone of the secular Left), "Why, he was the most important person since Jesus Christ--except, of course, that Jesus wasn't real."
That pretty much sums up the attempted hagiography of the anti-religious crowd in recent years. So a film about the personal life of Darwin, supposedly the greatest man of all time--the one whose birthday, February 12, is to supplant Abraham Lincoln, the current occupant, in American schools--should be a sure-fire seller. Candles will be lit before the movie posters in homes of skeptics around the world.
But the new flick Creation does not seem likely to add to the campaign for sainthood. Like Darwin's concept of life's origins, it just never seems to get started. Even Roger Ebert is rather discouraged.
What to do? Well, the earnest star, Paul Bettany, wants you to know that, contra Ebert, this really is about deicide, after all. The movie, he says, "happens to be about Darwin, who is in the process of killing God."
If that publicity doesn't pack the theaters, what will?
