Paul is such a trifle, such a mindless mess, that it’s almost not worth parsing, except for the fact that its sins are so representative of Hollywood religion-bashing that they bear scrutiny.
The film itself is mildly funny, a comic take on Starman and E.T. Two British nerds attend ComiCon in SoCal and then hit the road to visit various extraterrestrial landmarks such as Area 51 and the Black Mailbox.
On the road, they encounter a pot-smoking, potty-mouth slacker alien named Paul, who crash-landed on earth in 1947. (Funny how aliens can negotiate interstellar space but always seem to crash-land here. Maybe they are smoking something up there.) Paul is a great missed comic opportunity. He could have been wry, subtle, insightful, and even genuinely funny. Instead he is coarse, profane, hedonistic, and shallow.
Oh, and he’s Jesus Christ if you get rid of all that moral ethos crap.
Heroes need foils, and the film casts about for a proper enemy. At first, it seems, it might be a comic version of “Keys” from E.T. or the SETI researcher from Starman. But the moment he appears onscreen, the Bible-thumping (yes, actually thumping, that’s how lazy the writers are) father of the young female love interest gives it all away. He’s a born-again, rifle-toting (a must, along with Bible-thumping), pick-up driving, drooling moron who is so threatened by the existence of Paul that he must kill him on sight.
Of course, none of the writers of this dreck has an even glancing understanding of “intelligent design,” the theory (yes, Virginia, they’re all theories, now, aren’t they?) that the world is the result of planning by superior beings. It’s fascinating that the people who refuse to believe in an alien who made the world nevertheless find it easy to believe in aliens who stop by to heal our seas and souls before returning home.
Paul’s very existence makes the young woman, suffering from birth with a defective eye, insane. She, like the writers who invented her, cannot possibly find middle ground between belief and atheism. Paul could not possibly be created by the same god who created us—he looks so different! When the Bible says we were made in God’s image, it means literal image, right? Well, if you haven’t set foot inside a church your entire life, I guess you’d think that.
All well and good; attack belief. But why Christian belief? The answer is simple: Can you imagine replacing Christianity with Islam in the film? More to the point: would they have made a film about a bomb-toting, Koran-thumping father and his veiled, emotionally abused daughter?
Of course not.
And the reason they get away with libeling Christianity is that even though Christians make up more than 90% of America, unlike Islam, they are not prone to murdering those who offend them. So not only are the filmmakers uninformed, they’re also cowards.
When Paul predictably heals the young woman’s bad eye, we’re meant to draw a crayon line between him and Jesus, reducing Jesus to a punch line and elevating the healing powers of aliens—in which, ironically, the environmentalist left actually believe! Their god, the earth mother Gaia, will heal our wicked souls if we just choose paper instead of plastic.
Looked at this way, the religion of the left, statist/environmentalism, is far kookier than that of the right, Christianity has positively impacted hearts and lives for two thousand years, while its modern pagan alternative leaves its scattered, few adherents alienated, angry, bitter, and stupid.
Kind of the way they depict us.
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