Meet Dave
SPOILER ALERT - read on only if you do not care if some details of the film are revealed to you.
I do not do movie reviews, but this film says something important about the American way of life. Sometimes Hollywood gets it right - even if they don't realize they are mocking Muslims. In the film Meet Dave (2008) (Theatrical trailer here) a young boy on his telescope in a New York City apartment sees a meteor heading towards him. The small, fist-sized rock flies through his window and lands in his gold-fish bowl where it promptly begins to suck out all the water.
Three months later, on Liberty Island, a massive fireball crashes. Turns out the fireball is actually a human-sized spaceship in the form of its captain (played by a Eddie Murphy) who calls himself Dave Ming Cheng. Dave pilots the ship and is in charge of hundreds of one-inch tall aliens whose mission it is to save their planet Nil from dying of a lack of salt which powers their world. The rock they sent a few months earlier was supposed to drain the Earth's oceans but instead merely drained the young boy's goldfish bowl.
Removing all our salt-water would of course annihilate all life on our planet but the aliens do not care because their view of Earthlings is that we are murderous, brutal giants who are not worthy of living anyway.
As Dave and his crew get to know humans they see us differently than their earlier reports indicated. They find our species kind, helpful, fun-loving, and generous. Eventually, except for the Captain's second-in-command, appropriately named Number 2, they embrace our culture and lifestyle; our dancing, music, singing, and they way we treat each other, and especially our human way of expressing love.
The Captain polls his crew and they decide to spare Earth from destruction and to find another way to save their planet. But Number 2, who loathes humanity, takes control of the ship with a few like-minded crew.
How the Captain breaks the mutiny is not important. What I find revealing is how Number 2 is depicted. I have no doubt the screenwriters, Rob Greenberg and Bill Corbett, had Muslims in mind when they created the character of Number 2.
If Dave and his crew had landed in Saudi Arabia instead of New York City, they would have found a race of beings unworthy of existence. They would have found no music, no dancing, and no joy of life but only miserable creatures practicing unspeakable barbarity against each other; hateful monsters who enslave their female partners; primitive, savage, backward, ignorant sand fleas who spread their corrosive culture by force and unimaginable brutality. A race of people who, if not wiped out by aliens, will continue to practice their barbarity unchanged, unimproved, uncivilized until the doom of time when our galaxy is sucked into its own black hole. Had Dave instead chanced upon Muslims all the peoples of Earth would surely have been exterminated.
But the film is not about some random Earthlings, it is about America and how we Americans glory in the joy of life. It is in America where we find fulfillment of our destiny as human beings. That in America we live happy and free is the answer to the question, "What is the purpose of human existence?"
This entry is filed under the category of Immigration because I believe that if space aliens came to America they would want to assimilate into American culture. I make this assumption based on the fact that if aliens can get here in a space ship then they obviously must have a certain level of intelligence. Only complete idiots and Muslims would come to America and want to change the best political and economic system in the world into the same sewer they came from.
