Not even bothering to Amuse Ourselves To Death

Some time in the future, considerably closer in the future than you might imagine, the Earth will be dead. From a sky which is endlessly slate-grey will forever rain a black snow, the carbonised remains of every man, woman, child, animal or plant that ever formed part of the ecosystem. The land will be dead, the skies will be dead, the seas will be dead. All of the human race's hopes, dreams, fears, anguish and triumph will be meaningless. The Earth will be dead.

Sometime after that, the alien anthropologists will arrive. Lancing down through the atmosphere in their organically grown ships, they will use a gravity drive we cannot imagine to hover above the remains of our cities. They will start methodically sifting through the ashes of our civilization, using vast cranes, human sized robots, microbots, and nanotechnology. They will fit together our languages, our culture, our history, our minds, piece by painstaking piece.

And they will eventually find it. It will register as an anomoly on the inference engine doing the initial analysis, and it will call in a sophont. After five minutes of watching it, he (or she or some pronoun for a neuter or for an egg-bearing non-sexed gender we don't have) will stop and call the entire ship's company to view the artifact. They will sit (or perch, or rest on their tentacles - whatever) and watch.

And an hour and a half later, as the credits to "Epic Movie" are rolling, they will agree among themselves that we had it coming, wipe the memory banks and head off to Canopus to pick over a species that was actually worth a damn.

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"Epic Movie" is probably the biggest piece of shit I have ever seen.

I am not engaging in hyperbole here - I have witnessed things floating in toilet bowls that I would much rather watch again for 87 minutes.

If you have a choice between seeing this movie and getting a frontal lobotomy, I recommend you tell the docs to book the OR - the two will have the same effect on the brain, and at least you'll be getting anaesthesia with the lobotomy. Unfunny, unplotted, unwanted and unnecessary.

Look, you remember that scene in "Jackass" where the guy swallows a couple of eggs, drinks some milk, chews up some veges, and then throws up into a pan and cooks the result as an omelette? It's like that - a barely digested mess of allusions to recent movies, mixed with references to some of the more moronic bits of a moronic American pop culture, regurgitated onto celluloid and thrown at you due to a vague resemblence to something edible.

It's bad, people. I would give it a 0 out of 10, but I'll raise that to a 0.5 out of ten because it does make a couple of very weak pokes at Bush which might persuade the complete and utter moron voters to go for the Democratic candidate in 2008, assuming they can figure out how to pull a lever.