The Freedom of Silence

Overview: In the year 2030, fundamentalist Christian paranoid delusions and conspiracy theories about local P.S. 118 taking “under God” out of their daily pledge of allegiance somehow escalate into vanloads of faceless Darwinist G-Men kicking down doors to confiscate Gideon bibles and dragging children away to secret windowless atheist re-education compounds.

Directed By: Richard Robertson, 2011

The Case For: This is a great premise for its target audience, because as we all know, if there’s one thing Jesus freaks love it’s watching retarded made-up bullshit prophecies actually coming true for a change. Okay, if there’s only the one thing they love it’s probably Jesus actually, but that other thing we said is a close second, easy.

The Case Against: It seems like this movie wanted to be really deep and thought-provoking, but the only thoughts its writers actually managed to provoke out of their idiotic shit-brains and into the script were jewels like “if you don’t like chocolate ice cream, you’re probably a wifebeater and you’re going straight to Hell” and “in a world where Bibles are outlawed, only outlaws will have Bibles.”

This just in:

We’ll be blunt: no, we have no idea what the hell “The Freedom of Silence” is supposed to mean either. Between the screaming match in a thunderstorm, the worldwide streaming Jesus Galt speech, and the meaty sounds of a brutal interrogation as interpreted by a legally deaf intern foley artist, there isn’t nearly enough silence in this feature. Perhaps The Freedom of Smugness, or The Freedom of Poorly Constructed Ice Cream Metaphors, or The Freedom of Smarmy Christian Indignance would have been a better title for this tightly-coiled pile of heaven-kissed ho-ho-holy horseshit.

Like any good, self-respecting Christian movie about wholesome family values and clean moral living, Freedom of Silence is essentially one long, meandering softcore torture porn occasionally interspersed with whining about how Christianity has it so tough these days, what with the dedicated cable preaching networks, multi-million dollar ultra-churches with massaging pews and hymn sheets that sing themselves, and nearly complete control of every level of American government. But dammit, it’s just not cool to be a Christian anymore. What they really need is some of that sweet, sweet persecution, like in the good old days, back when they were the oppressed; the underdogs; the Rebel Alliance.

Of course, this is set in the present^[1], so the whole feeding people to lions thing would have been a little bit of a stretch. How about some guys dressed up like the Men in Black rolling around snatching up every street preacher they can find and dragging them off to Gitmo in broad daylight?

“I’m not trying to force anything on anyone, i’m just trying to tell you all that you have to believe in every word I’m saying or you’ll burn in Hell forever, that’s all!”

If you’re a regular reader you‘ve probably seen this video before from our first encounter with this movie, but there was no way we couldn’t include it again. That has to be the single worst attempt at street preaching in recorded history. How can you try to make an argument against moral relativism by comparing it to ice cream flavors? “Some men like chocolate, other men like rainbow sherbet and beating the shit out of their wives?” Is there a statement of the One Correct Ice Cream Flavor somewhere in the Dead Sea Scrolls, or is the takeaway message supposed to be that domestic battery is a matter of taste?

Somehow, that disjointed rambling so intrigues little Johnny Everyteen that he sneaks out of his parents’ house at night to go read the Bible. Is this a movie with its finger on the pulse of American youth, or what? “Yeah, me and the boys are heading up to Salvation Point this Friday night, we’re going to power through some Deuteronomy and binge on a box of communion wafers, it’ll be totally spiritual bro.” This leads to an even funnier sequence where Johnny’s parents find his Bible and give him a stern talking-to, which really feels like it was lifted from a Saturday morning special with the word “joint” filtered to “Bible”, which in turn is just spectacularly ironic on so many levels.

[1] Supposedly it’s actually set in the far-future year of 2030, in which we can all look forward to having cars, computers, and cell phones that were hilariously outdated in 2011, and also universal health care triggers the downfall of society and burning all the Bibles...somehow.