Complex Numbers

Evan essence

Huge chunks of Evan Almighty were filmed around here. For a while there, they were actually building an ark near Crozet

That's a nearby community, pronounced the French way. That's because Claudius Crozet was French. He was a civil engineer for the Commonwealth of Virginia a long time ago

, which was useful when we had some nasty rainstorms coming through here last year.

So tonight the local fancy renovated movie theatre

The Paramount, in which renovation I was marginally involved as a civil engineer

held the Charlottesville premiere of Evan Almighty. My wife scored tickets to the event because she was involved in something related to it, so I got to go for free.

It's not a movie I wanted to see in the theatre, and probably would not have gone without the freebie. Still, with the opportunity to be at the premiere - well, call me a sucker for that sort of thing. I figured it'd be worth seeing just for the local scenery, which I never get tired of. The director was there, introducing the film, and a lot of the people in the audience had been extras (sadly, none of them were elephants, giraffes, or lions).

So, should you see the movie or save your money?

(Fear not, no spoilers here. Nothing you can't glean from the previews.)

First, let's talk about God.

Sometimes, I fancy myself a writer. A writer can be considered the God of his or her own story. The writer makes the decisions, sets everything up, and has sole discretion over the way things are. The reader can dislike the writer's decisions, but she can't argue with them - usually (present company and rate/review system excepted). The writer can be right or wrong, but she's always the writer.

Now, here's the thing - as soon as you put God in your story as a character, you have what I call the "infallible narrator." The writer can still be wrong, but God-the-character is always right. This is because, if God-the-character were ever wrong, she or he would lose all credibility as God and become someone who plays at being God.

So you have to handle God carefully if you write her into a story. Kevin Smith knew this on a basic level, and so his God in Dogma (which, spelled backwards, is Am God), played by Alanis Morissette, was mute.

The God of Evan Almighty, as with Bruce Almighty before it, was played by Morgan Freeman, and I have to say he does a kick-ass job as the Big Guy. Still, the importance of point of view can't be underestimated: God tells Evan to build an ark. We see God telling Evan to build an ark. We, the audience, are convinced the guy in the white suit is really God even before Evan is - thanks to a few shortcuts by the author. So we sympathize with Evan's plight, to some extent or another, because we know that God, in the context of the story, really did command him to build an ark.

But here's the thing - again, not giving away much here - with point of view: Anyone comes up to me and says, "God told me to do such-and-such," and I don't care what it is: kill their family, feed the homeless, build an ark, whatever - I won't believe them. So I have a lot of sympathy for the other characters as well. They haven't had "signs." They haven't had Morgan Freeman doing parlor tricks around them. The audience, I think, is supposed to believe that the supporting characters are supposed to accept it "on faith" that God spoke with Evan.

And that's where the movie fails, for me, as a movie. It was funny - funnier than I expected it to be, with the physical slapstick humor kept to a fairly small segment of the movie. The animals were cute. The plotline was - well, I've seen a lot worse. There were too many Messages in it, but that's related to my main point, which is that when you put God in a movie, or a story, you're cheating.

Now - this is not to say that you can't portray people believing in God, and the movie kind of starts out that way - people who have a simple faith in God, and who pray. Nothing inherently wrong with that.

It's when the one you're praying to shows up with piles of wood that you have to wonder.

The main message? Be kind to each other. Well, hell, I don't need a movie to tell me that.

Basically, it's a fun movie, not to be taken seriously - it doesn't take itself seriously - and better than I expected it to be.

And the scenery is awesome.