Stop this atheism-bashing!!

Rating: Null/10 (8 September 2002)

Mel Gibson does a good enough job of portraying the anguish of a man who has lost a lot personally, and who has just given up his faith in God in a big way: quitting the priesthood. He makes his abandonment of religion known when he derides it as 'fairy tales' at one point in the film.
But the underlying "moral message" in the film seems to be that by deciding that religion is not the answer, you couldn't possibly come to grips with a crisis as portrayed, and would be likely to (as Mel did) instantly go into a personal abyss of uncertainty and intellectual vacuum where there is no meaning or purpose to be found... Only by 'donning the cloth' again can that ever be re-found, as Mel shows us.
So for me, as an atheist, the film seems to say that if you're an atheist, you tread the wrong path, and that ultimately you must hold onto or rediscover/find your faith in order to pull through.
**POSSIBLE SPOILER ALERT!!**
Plothole-wise, why would aliens from a civilisation as undoubtedly technically brilliant as theirs EVER think about prancing around a planet which is 70% water without some form of protective gear if water was like sulphuric acid to them?!
As the movie plodded along, I expected that there MUST be a major plot twist at the end to change the pace. I suspected that the aliens would have been actually benign, and then the film could've gone on to explore some really interesting stuff. I noticed that well into the crisis, the aliens really hadn't done anything that could be unambiguously seen as hostile... You'd think that these beings' advanced abilities would at least be capable of breaking down a door in short order IF they were hostile. Indeed, that fact should have been obvious to the Hess brothers or any of the TV/radio broadcasters globally that it was unlikely that annihilation was imminent, and that these may well have been the crew from Close Encounters! Nope, they spent most of the film searching for baseball bats and knives to keep them at bay, never pausing to discuss the nature of the beasts.
So, I really hoped that he wouldn't wimp out, and stay the atheist course, if only to portray that way of thinking as a viable alternative, rather than reaching for the Cross like an addict returns to cigarettes!