Creation is too hot to handle

Jeremy Thomas, the producer of The Last Emperor and Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence, has a new film debuting Sept. 25th but you won’t see it in the United States. If you’re in the U.K., however, you should have no problem. Ditto Australia and the rest of the world.

The film? Creation. It’s about a young English naturalist (Paul Bettany -Silas of The Da Vinci Code) who struggles with his faith following the death of his 10 year old daughter Annie (Martha West), sharing the torment of that loss with his wife Emma (Jennifer Connelly -Bettany’s real-life spouse and acclaimed actor) who remains deeply religious.

Oh, did I mention that young English naturalist’s name is non other than Charles Darwin?

And why isn’t the film also debuting in the U.S. in September?

The answer, as I’m sure you might suspect is that it hasn’t found a distributor in the nation where only 39% of the populace publicly accepts the fact of evolution -where a full one-third of the population is so fully superstitious as to believe that the writings of Bronze and Iron Age goat-herders are literally true.

It isn’t that any Christian uprising has threatened to boycott the movie should it be shown on U.S. screens (that might actually ensure enough free publicity to actually make distributing it lucrative). Instead, it seems that the U.S. distributors simply view the prospect as a potential loss in a nation so superstitious and backward as ours.

Let me leave you with the trailer:

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“You’ve killed God, sir!”

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