A long-winded, chaotic primer on Hollywood's Neo-Buddhism

Rating: 5/10 (1 June 2015)

Beautifully filmed, acted, and cleverly devised, this monumental dissertation on Hollywood's Neo-Buddhism is a complete waste of time for anyone who doesn't buy into it's ideology. It even misses the point of Hindu/Buddhist philosophy, since it sees reincarnation as a desirable cosmic adventure, rather than a burdensome cycle of personal and material existence that must be transcended to achieve personal enlightenment and nirvana.
Basically about the resolution of oppressor/oppressed relationships throughout a broad panorama of revisionist fictional history, this film can be summarized as a positive twisting of Satan's temptation of Eve, i.e. "Ye shall be as gods." All lines of conventional moral restrictions need to be "crossed" in order for human "progress" to continue. Thus it can make no distinction between genuine moral principles of good and evil and merely human prejudices and traditions. It offers nothing really helpful about the human condition, since it cannot make this distinction. For the ideology of this film, all conventions are of merely human origin, and are therefore fallible and temporary. There are no really good prohibitions that keep humanity from destroying itself; all are merely obstacles to human fulfillment and actualization.
The devil must be very pleased to have such an eloquent spokesperson as the writer of this story and the script of this film.
Caveat emptor!