★½                 By Z.P. Kibbleworth               September 29, 2090

Even in times when we have to deep fry our water in mutation balls to protect against potential radiation attacks, we can always count on religious fundamentalist films to deliver the goods. By no means will they give us anything resembling quality cinema, but to those depraved souls like myself they are a bountiful source of mockery. I know that as a professional film critic my job is to take movies seriously and to communicate a respect for the craft, but I am weak, Lord, and films like this are just too tempting not to lampoon. Besides, I already exerted a great deal of mental fortitude giving a serious and balanced review to a Rizz Chaddington film that did not deserve it, so I have earned this. The time has come for me to tear into the Terranists.

Terrans Rule, Sinners Drool is more or less what one might expect from a film made as propaganda for a fringe fundamentalist religious organization, but it has considerably more edge than these kinds of films customarily do. For those off-world readers who may have the privilege of being less familiar with Terranism, it is a branch of radical Christianity which holds that following his resurrection, Jesus Christ built a spaceship and began traversing the stars, marking all of space as sacred. Thus, the migration of humans throughout the solar system in the last century, and particularly the rise of interplanetary commerce, is an act of the utmost sacrilege defiling the Holy Expanse that rightfully belongs to Jesus. The Terranists therefore maintain a hardline conservative stance of keeping all humans on Earth, and proclaiming those who live elsewhere in the solar system (who just so happen to disproportionately be queer people) as an irredeemable sinner. Terrans Rule, Sinners Drool, written and directed by Pius Wiederspoon, a billionaire megapastor who preaches temperance and simplicity, is the story of a community of Terrans conscripted to construct an interplanetary spaceway when God’s wrath comes and purges the sinners, leaving only the faithful to inherit the galaxy.

There is not a whole lot of skill present in a film like this. Its lead performances give the main figures in the film less the feel of characters and more of the speakers who come to elementary schools to do fun anti-drug PSAs. The lead actress, Delilah Langher, seems to be using her customer service persona to play her character Vivian, maintaining a forced smile throughout all her shots, which is a particularly perplexing choice when she has scenes describing losing her son to the bubonic plague despite her strongest efforts to keep him away from any kind of vaccine. With costar Matthew Impotentio, who plays her husband Thaddeus, she has all the chemistry of a block of moldy cheese. (I suspect, but cannot confirm, that the lack of any sort of physical intimacy between the characters is a result of one or both of the two refusing to kiss anyone other than their actual spouse. Perhaps, though, leaving such intimacy out of the film was a wise choice, given how visibly the actors are squirming even holding hands with each other.) The best performance in the film surprisingly comes from Ziggy Sawdust, who, yes, is still doing movies. He, at least, seems to understand the kind of film he is in, and plays his wise-but-eccentric old-timer character accordingly, caking all of his lines in a delightful sarcasm and giving a physicality to his role reminiscent of Wicker Man Nicolas Cage.

Granted, the film’s performances were hardly helped by the material the actors were given to work with. The film exists and has a surprisingly ample budget largely because of the central involvement of Pius Wiederspoon, whose name is recognizable enough to bring something like this into a worldwide theatrical release. But Mr. Wiederspoon is not, by trade, a filmmaker, and it shows. His script for the film has much more the rhythm and timbre of a sermon than a narrative. Characters are not so much characters as embodiments of Terranist archetypes such as the faithful salt-of-the-earth housewife or the megalomaniacal industrial heathen, and the words that come out of their mouths are only thinly veiled aphorisms adapted from the addresses Mr. Wiederspoon gives to his congregations. If the film is meant to be a parable, then this all makes sense, but the film does not have anything to offer beyond its base insistence that all the non-Terranists are evil and ruining the universe. Such proclamations grow stale after being repeated ceaselessly for fifteen minutes. The film tries to use them to sustain a two-hour runtime.

As a director, Mr. Wiederspoon appears at least aware of his lack of qualification, and thus more or less leaves most of that work to his crew of film school graduates desperate for employment. This was probably a wise decision. To the benefit of the film and the detriment of my mockery, it means that most shots are in focus and well-lit and the film on the whole exhibits a baseline level of technical competence. It also means, though, that the film lacks any kind of distinctive style, with every scene shot the exact same way, whether it is a banal conversation meant to introduce a few characters or the literal end of the world. The film’s editing follows similarly rigid principles, caring less about maintaining the rhythm of a scene or using cuts as a storytelling device and more about making each shot last almost exactly four seconds regardless of what is happening. The film also has substantial visual effects. Terranist doctrine makes going into space for any purpose other than holy pilgrimage a cardinal sin, and so all the scenes where the characters are brought into space have to be done with effects instead of just shooting in space like most other productions do. Here I give my sympathies to the artists at the visual effects companies who were obviously just told to render a shot of a spaceship crossing a moon with no additional specifications and had to do their best. The poor quality of such imagery in the film is not their fault.

The intention with this film was not, I think, as noble as it might claim. This is not a film that is meant to spread the Terranist gospel and try to convert you, this is a film where the Terranists try to assert that they are better than you. If nothing else, the title should make that evident. They want to gleefully remind you that you will surely burn in hell for your desecration of the Holy Expanse and make you fear the day when vengeance comes. If this is truly the aim of the film, then they picked the absolute worst time to release it. Every day asteroids and moons across the solar system are getting bombed and Earth’s magnetonuclear shield wall runs the risk of failing, at which point we are probably all actually dead. So the threats from some extremist religious sect about God coming to turn my organs inside out any day now hardly strikes me as intimidating, and in fact is rather funny. Honestly, I could use a good laugh. Terrans Rule, Sinners Drool gave me one, even if by its own incompetence.