Zeitgeist (2007)

Truly Dreadful Film

Good films always raise compelling questions, whether the format is fiction or documentary fact.

While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

It's a good bad... and worth a popcorn matinée. While it's easy to lament what could have been...

This documentary is literally just a bunch of conspiracy theories. For the people who believe this to be "true", the facts stated don't directly prove the suggested conclusions. There's a reason it's called a conspiracy "theory". Now for the people who say it's supposed to make you question the truth, it simply doesn't intend to do that. As already stated it comes to its own conclusions. Its own version of the "truth" which again has no reliable evidence.Even the editing is horrible. No subtlety in the way he gets his point across. The intro to Part II about 9/11 is a joke. The exact way planes are shown colliding is worthy of parody. Oh wait, it has been already multiple times. Cringe worthy. P.S. An audio recording of Alex Jones is used, but his name isn't quoted an the bottom of the screen. Now what does that say.

The more I think about Zeitgeist, the more I realize how ironic it is; Zeitgeist is more a symptom (and a fairly malignant one) of its subject matter than an antidote. The entire documentary purports to be inviting you to open your mind and educate yourself, yet when you do so all you find out is how hypocritical Zeitgeist is. So... we don't want to be unkind or cause hurt feelings, but we want to be academically correct. Yes, sir.Here are just a few factual errors; this is by no means extensive.The Crux was indeed visible from the Mediterranean 2000 years ago (in modern day it is only visible from the southern hemisphere), but it was not called the Southern Cross. It was referred to as Centaurus and was part of a larger constellation. Only the Australians referred to it as Southern Cross, and it's impossible that Australia's indigenous peoples were in contact with the people of the Mediterranean at this point in history.Egyptian mythology simply cannot be distilled down to a bulleted list of character traits about two of its myriad of Gods. If you bother to educate yourself about Egyptian mythology, you will quickly realize that all of their gods traded roles and changed from dynasty to dynasty, pharaoh to pharaoh. Throughout Egypt's existence, Set's role was revised repeatedly. In fact, he was occasionally HELPFUL to Horus--he ferried Re through the underworld every night! This is among the most basic and simple facts about ancient Egypt and it blows my mind that Zeitgeist got it THAT wrong.The Egyptians did not have a concept of good and evil as you & I understand it. The good and evil that we commonly understand were introduced to the world by the Judean philosophy. Applying modern ideas of good and evil to ancient pre- Judean cultures is folly.But even more fundamentally, you simply can't use Egyptian history as a factual litmus test for ANYTHING, let alone Christianity. All their records dissolved when the papyrus disintegrated. Those hieroglyphs that represent what we know of their history are all spun political speech--you might think of it as the Fox News of the ancient Egyptian world. Egypt's legacy is its architecture and art, NOT its facts! Archaeologists have long since recognized this shortcoming and that we will never know the day-to-day common stories of Egypt and thus a "true" or "real" representation of its culture and people. Imagine 3000 years from now investigators attempting to piece together our heritage solely from stories on Fox News, and you start to get the picture.Horus was indeed born on December 25th--but Horus dies and is reborn the other 364 days of the year, too. He represents the sun. HELLO? MCFLY? The laundry list of other supposed deities that were all born on December 25th is glazed over pretty fast. Why, pray tell, have I never heard this anywhere but Zeitgeist, even as a curiosity? It's... questionable, to put it politely... that this is the only source of this information. Its justification--it was stricken from the record by people who didn't want you to know about it. (I.e.... "The devil did it.")The whole conspiratorial assumptions the film makes about Christianity inheriting the traits of Egyptian religion is pretty uneducated, and is a typical attitude of non- Christians/non-Jews. This was not a conspiracy. It was a deliberate, visible, calculated PR war between Judaism and ancient Egypt. When God blotted out the sun, for instance, it didn't just happen to be a random attempt to scare Egyptians. It was a direct, overt refutation of Ra himself. Any traits that first-gen Judaism took from Egypt was an overt assertion of its superiority. The same can idea can be applied to the pagan astrological attributes that Christianity inherited. It's not a conspiracy. For example, Easter and Christmas both occur on Pagan holidays, something the ancient Roman Catholic church did to appease pagans and make the conversion to Christianity a bit smoother (it is most likely that Jesus was actually born in April.)Zeitgeist's portrayal of Christians burning their wallets (?) because of their interpretation of Revelation is not representative of the whole picture; those individuals are in the minority--but yeah it's out there. It is also personally offensive.Feel free to look up my review on Loose Change, and all that business applies to the second portion of the film. I have no comments on the third portion of the film, which may or may not be accurate for all I know. I do not consider myself educated in that subject matter.Additionally, I feel confident in saying Carl Sagan would not have approved of being included in this documentary, considering how wrong its astronomy was. And it's disrespectful to do so after he's no longer around to have any say about it.But outside of the nitpicks, this film is a bad faith film. It's inviting us, the audience, into this world of privileged information that nobody else in the world has. If Zeitgeist does what it sets out to do in spirit, you should be able to see through this film.Taking this film strictly as entertainment, it's actually quite amusing and a worthy watch. It is well crafted and nicely produced. The narrator (who I'm going to assume is also the editor) does not sound like a pimply-faced 14 year old, unlike Loose Change. But it should not be interpreted as documentary. Conspiracy documentaries are really coming out of the woodwork these days as a voice of their own, and while I encourage criticism and questioning, I encourage knowing what the hell you're talking about even more. I give this film a few dubious points for being among the first of its kind and amusing--but that's all I can bring myself to award it with.

I am effectively stupider from watching this 'documentary'. When I say 'documentary', I note that it is completely and utterly in jest, because this movie watches like an uneducated tinfoil hatted person sat in their Faraday cage and thought up things based on face value without any research with their imaginary friend, both egging each other on to come up with more and more outrageous and non-sensical unsupported theories.There is more than enough information even on this page debunking the large majority of things presented in this is bizarre production so I won't go into them again, start with the 'goofs' page though, because honestly, the factual incorrectness of this appallingly fallacious film needs to be realised.And all that is said without commenting on the disgustingly average presentation style that is presented by this 'doco' - I have never watched anything with such little production value and when I say 'value', I don't mean it in terms of monetary value, I mean it in that whoever wrote this and filmed it had such disregard for the people they that would be so desperate to believe what it had to say that they got through the whole thing, they didn't even bother to edit it properly so it was watchable out of respect for the viewer. Effectively they had so little regard for anyone who stayed through this tripe the whole way as they felt they must be offering so little to society as to have time or inclination to watch this entire gascloud, it contains large periods of noise or flashing montages, with no artistic, informational or viewer value at all.Honestly, do not waste your time - go to a 9/11 website instead, it'll be heaps quicker, more entertaining and closer to anything factual you'll get in this abomination. Shame on the people who created this utterly vacuous, false rubbish.

Divided in three sections: Religion, 9/11 and the economical system, or should I say the banking system, this documentary is very informative. It starts rather annoyingly though with a cacophony of sounds and pictures of war and whatever. Way, way too long. After over 30 seconds of that, I fast forwarded on Netflix until it got to the crux of the presentation: Religion. Religion is evil, we are told. Completely agree, but I learned far more than I thought I would. Then came the «Truth» about the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center. Great stuff. I had more or less accepted the official version, but after what I heard, I realized I have been fed bullshit. The arguments made for the alternate version (whatever it is) are quite compelling. I never liked Bush and Cheney, but what I heard there make the evil emperor and Darth Vader in Star Wars look tame by comparison. On the Central Bank, the third part, my knowledge in this area is less than adequate to judge the veracity of this alternate vision. As a result, I found the argumentation tedious and a tad to pat to be convincing. As good as it is, this documentary would have been much better with about 15 minutes chopped off. But it does make you think, a lot.