Oh God. Is This How “They” See “Us”?

Dear reader, I’ve just wasted a quarter of an hour of my life watching that video. Yes, that one.

And I still cannot believe how truly bad it is.

I mean, it’s Ed Wood bad. Worse than Ed Wood bad. Worse than the most execrable product of the most lowest common denominator film school anywhere in the world.

It is, seriously, beyond parody.

Much of it is shot in blackface.

Yes, seriously.

It appears, at least from the colour of his neck, that producers could not find an Asian or Arab American actor prepared to deliver lines such as “Man + X = Islamic Terrorist, Islamic Terrorist – X = Man”.

I wonder why?

Green screen technology descends to depths I would have considered unimaginable. In several scenes, the cast, complete with primary school nativity play Roman (huh?!) soldier appear to be levitating over a silver desert, outside a tent that any decent primary school nativity play would be embarrassed by.

In fact, most primary school nativity plays would be embarrassed by the sets, the costumes and the acting.

My favourite scene? The one where the 120-year-old lady is torn apart by camels, represented by a shot of two legs in the air.

The production values here are lower and the acting worse than in the lowest of low-rent German pornos: the two actors with the capacity to deliver lines beyond “I haff cum to fix zee vashing machine” have been overdubbed.

Well, I use the term “dubbed” loosely.

The producers seem to have engaged in a degree of subterfuge about the script, and many of the actors seem to have believed they were filming something completely different.

So new lines have been crudely whacked over the top. I have seen better lip-synching in Communist Poland, and Polish is hard to match to English.

The director has a background in softcore, which is unfortunate, to say the least. I had my hands over my eyes during an especially unfortunate scene where the Prophet takes refuge from the demons delivering the Koran (though later the trailer backtracks from demons to a good old-fashioned con) by performing oral sex on Khadija.

And for a fourteen-minute trailer to include the phrase “Mahomet the bastard” three times (by my count) is, well, impressive.

I’m on the atheist end of the agnostic spectrum, though with some familiarity with the Koran, and I still feel sullied by the experience.

It is, in all honesty, hugely, hugely offensive.

Can anyone truly believe that this represents an organised Christian assault on Islamic values?

Do they REALLY think this is the best Hollywood can do?

A ten year old child with some mates, a Mac and an iPhone could blow this movie out of the water.

Life of Brian it ain’t. The Passion of the Christ it ain’t. It ain’t even Piss Christ.

But nor is it the Blood Libel, or the Protocols of Zion.

So I really, really hope that extremists on both side, Christian and Muslim, can take a step back.

Because this shouldn’t be how “we” see “them”, and it shouldn’t be how “they” see “us”.

Angry about Iraq? About Afghanistan? Go demonstrate.

But don’t waste your energies on this piece-of-shit film.