So, I was watching this kinf of aweful movie on the Sci Fi channel called Crimson Force. Ordinarily I wouldn’t blog about cheesy movies on Sci Fi but it had some anthropological elements that drove me straight up the wall. The movie proposes a novel solution to the origins of anatomically modern humans and the fate of the neandethals (one that Dembski would approve of…). The movie is set on Mars and martians really, really exist. Their society is divided between a warrior class and a preistly class, apparently the priests are the good guys. At any rate, there are some criminal elements that get exiled to earth. Because they didn’t evolve on earth they succumb to bacteria and viruses and what not, but before they die they mate with the neanderthals (“…the missing link” exclaims one character who is supposed to have anthropological training). The offspring of this mating, channeling Oedipus, do the poor neanderthals in (which of course means that no can ask “If humans evovled from neanderthals why are there still neanderthals?”). Out of Africa Mars, indeed. At any rate the martians soon overcome their issues with earth’s bateria and spend a lot of time swiping plants from tropical rain forests (but “…we have destroyed a lot of our rainforests…” says the same character mentioned above) and growing them in hydroponics gardens on Mars (for their pharmaceutical value). All this wandering about in rain forests had a profound impact on the culture of the Neanderthal-Martian hybrids. For example the Sumerian language and cuneiform are derived from the martian language (which of course raises the question, can a culture become advanced enough to engage in space travel using cuneiform to communicate their scientific results?).
Total dreck, refrain from watching it whenever possible…
Filed under: Movie Reviews |
Afarensis: Anthropology, Evolution, and Science 
“The movie proposes a novel solution to the origins of anatomically modern humans and the fate of the neandethals (one that Dembski would approve of…).”
What, you mean the Neanderthals got Raptured?
Hadn’t thought of that…I meant that Dembski argues that space aliens could be the “Designer”. His paper on human evolution also made a lot of the idea of “sudden emergence” of Homo which I was poking fun at also…
Speaking as someone who used to work for the Skiffy Channel magazine, there’s a reason why the Channel’s slogan should be “Where Bad TV and Movies Go To Die.” Skiffy Channel President Bonnie Hammer is so cheap that she allegedly uses both sides of the toilet paper, and expecting Skiffy to run any movie of any scientific value except by accident is like expecting Whitley “Deliverance: The Next Generation” Strieber to have something coherent to say about the SETI movement.
warrior class or priest….reminds me of a story Jeshua Ben Joseph (also called jesus) another famous martian who questioned whether we humans could (or would choose to ) EVOLVE
Speaking as a “pup from Kennewick Man-ville…..any time solid science fact…the cuniformic record exists and has been dated to 6,000 bc…….yes the interpretation of what it translates to (again like the jesus “story”), and whether it is accuratly describing the “dogon ” mitochondrodrotic cellular division used in these anchient cloning violations of the “prime directive” deserves futher investigation pehaps even debate :
hooray for Enki and screw Enlil perhaps the “jean luc picard ” looking body found here in s.e. washington and dated to 9,000 bc may have been on the run from Marduk and the other slave Masters (who liked to call themselves gods…thus the big Akenaten plea for a return to Sovreignty ) the humans were becoming confused and fighting and fleeing no wonder Indians semm so Free
Salve Species of God details this quite professionally unlike the less scientific Sitchen and J.A. West interpretations http://www.godchecker.com/pantheon/mesopotamian-mythology.php?deity=IGIGI
Um, Okay, you do realize this is a review of a movie that appeared on the Science Fiction Channel, right?