Today I will review Bibleman – A Fight for Faith so you won’t have to lose your brain cells. You can view the whole thing HERE.
Yes that’s right… discontented with the lack of overt religious themes in mainstream superheroes such as Superman or Spiderman, CBN has created a series called “Bibleman”. Part Jedi Knight (who, judging from the choreography hasn’t even mastered the simple Shii-Cho form) and part former security guard turned holy avenger, Bibleman battles stereotypical one-sided supervillains, some of whom have been effeminized to imply that they are homosexuals.
In the beginning, Bibleman’s sidekick Cypher (the African-American in the picture) fights off thieves who intend to steal bibles from a Christian bookstore and burn them… for no particular reason whatsoever except maybe that they hate religion or something.
We soon find out that the real enemy is someone named ‘The Wacky Protester’ (the ridiculous-looking thing at the left of the poster), who has a machine that generates a portal to a virtual world where “there is no God”. The Protester essentially wants to lure little kids into his ‘funbox’ (nothing wrong there…) and convert them into atheists, as if there isn’t any indoctrination coming from anyone in the religious community and just being an atheist were some sort of horrible atrocity. It is at this point where the film makes a pathetic attempt at pop culture, when the talking computer that is the Wacky Protester’s partner in crime compares his virtual world machine to “The Matrix”.
Two kids are quickly abducted from a Christian summer camp, lured inside the machine, and converted into atheists by the virtual world’s subpar 3D graphics and random buzzing CGI bees… somehow. But unfortunately for the Protestor, Biblegirl – despite being a creationist and biblical literalist – is able to spout out a bunch of Treknobabble in Bibleman’s pseudoscience lab to determine what was happening to those two kids who became atheists.
Bibleman and Cypher then engage in a battle royale with the Wacky Protestor – if you consider a crappy musical number and lightsaber choreography more pathetic than any Star Wars fanfilms that I’ve seen a ‘battle royale’ – to save the souls of those two children. Of course, God always wins in the end, so despite the Protestor and his swarm of CGI bees’ best efforts, Bibleman prevails and those two kids can continue to be good fundamentalists who will grow up voting Republican because of ‘family values’ issues.
It’s ironic that Bibleman – A Fight for Faith implies that atheists are out to indoctrinate young people into not believing in Christianity when the film itself is doing the exact same thing towards atheism – essentially indoctrinating kids, who form and hold opinions much more easily than adults, that atheists are all elitist college nerds who should be feared. But I would argue that this film also teaches kids a far more dangerous lesson – that people different from your conservative Christian self are somehow ‘out to get you’; replace ‘atheist’ with any other religion or ethnic group and this film would be just as reprehensible. On the other hand, the effort (or lack thereof) that CBN put into special effects made the film more hilarious and bearable than otherwise intended.
Overall, for promoting negative stereotypes about atheists and to aim it towards the most susceptible audience possible, Bibleman – A Fight for Faith gets 4.5 out of 5 popped collars.
