The cheerful bursting-with-good-news faces that proclaim a “paradigm shift” in the human condition. The too-fast-to-say-“wait-a-minute” barrage of scientific-sounding verbiage.

All that’s missing from the experience of What The Bleep!?: Down The Rabbit Hole is a gizmo in the lobby to scan your mind, and guys in jumpsuits seeking donations.

Not exactly a sequel, What The Bleep!?: Down The Rabbit Hole is described as a “director’s cut” of What The (Bleep) Do We Know?, the surprise hit 2004 pseudo-documentary. Buttressed by cheery cartoon animation and a playlet starring Marlee Matlin about “self discovery” and quantum godhood, it purported to be the latest news in quantum physics, but was really an elaborate rationalization for the thoughts of Ramtha, a 10,000-year-old warrior who ostensibly communicates through a blowsy “medium” named J.Z. Knight.

What it means in Down The Rabbit Hole is more talking heads, and a lot more Ramtha.

The participation of the Ramtha School of Enlightenment was downplayed when What The (Bleep) was released. But it wasn’t long before real scientists like Richard Dawkins screened it and said they’d never heard of these quantum “experts.” Some experiments therein — including one involving mind-control over water crystals — turned out to be infamously unduplicatable in labs.

My editor will be pleased to know I’m about to put the phrase “begging the question” to its proper use — to mean the basing of an argument on a false premise. And What The Bleep!? begs questions like a street kid begs loonies. In the inane play-within-the-doc, Marlee Matlin plays an emotionally-troubled photographer apparently still fuming over being left at the altar. But those bad vibes are worn down by a series of revelations proffered by friendly, bearded white-haired guys, or in one case, a basketball-playing street kid who makes the ball do quantum tricks. If we can affect water with our minds, and we are 98% water... well just imagine (gush!).

The New Agey messages themselves aren’t that dissimilar from what you may hear a movie star regurgitate on a talk show — the world is an illusion, we can create miracles, emotions are addictions, religion is bad, etc. But in an increasingly scientifically-illiterate society, many are vulnerable to belief couched in bafflegab. It applies as much here as when a Creationist says evolution breaks the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

But the most dubious What The (Bleep)ism is that a revolutionary merger is in play between reason and religion.

A glance at the world will tell you they’ve seldom been farther apart. Of course, the world’s an illusion anyway.

Bottom line

A soapbox for Ramtha, a 10,000-year-old warrior who speaks via a woman named J.Z. Knight, What The Bleep!?: Down The Rabbit Hole is the kind of pseudo-science you hear regurgitated by movie stars on talk shows. The pseudo-doc takes snippets of real science and makes huge leaps of “logic” to support notions that the world is illusory, minds can change the past, etc.

(This film is rated PG)
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