Chariots of the Gods?, dir. Harald Reinl (1970)

NIKKI says:
Okay, you got me.

How can you not walk away from this little movie and not believe in aliens? I think I've been hornswaggled. Why did Steve so desperately want me to see this film? Because he knew there was no turning back, no fighting the "facts" raised here.

There's a spaceman in an ancient painting! An actual space man! With a space ship! Has anyone explained that yet? They reckon they explained the Easter Island mystery, but what about Spaceman in Painting!

Yeah, this movie got me fired up. I've been living with my head in the sand! I never considered, "god" might be a spaceman. Although it makes a strange kind of sense. In the beginning of this film, we're reminded of just how commonplace is the idea of replicating idols. An isolated tribe, in the movie, see a plane flying overhead for the first time, and recreate its image with bamboo, waiting for it to come back. Is this what happened on Easter Island? Does it explain the ancient Japanese Dogu? It's a compelling theory, because it makes so much sense.

What doesn't make sense is how the pyramids were built. Steve tells me he's seen a show that presents a convincing, Earth-based theory. In this movie, there are walls and building all over the world, built long before machinery and cranes, that defy all reason. How do 500 ton boulders stack on top of each other? How were towers made, carved from one piece of rock, standing 50 feet in the air? How did that happen? How did they carve and build with few tools and equipment? And, to top it off, why do so many ancient drawing look like alien beings? It's impossible to ignore -- not necessarily that Van Daniken (whose theories the film outlines) is wholly correct, but that there is a possibility that all is not as we might like to suspect.

This, frankly, is the closest I've come to believing aliens have interacted with us at some stage. Why don't they do it anymore? What's different? Why are they so secretive, only coming into women's rooms at night? When will they come back?

This movie opened my mind. It's slightly cheesy, and jumps to wild conclusions at times, (lines on a field -- it's most certainly an intergalatic landing strip!), but it's wonderfully thought-provoking. Especially for someone like me, who loves the idea of alien men coming to Earth and helping out the locals with their big walls before, as Ezekiel so clearly outlines in the Old Testament, jumping in their ships, hitting the gas, and zooming away.

3/5

STEVE says:

This is another one that I remember being better than it actually was. Cheesy and dated, much of it looked like a travelogue, with long stretches of scenery and local colour before the narrator jumped in and told us where we were and what we were looking at. A fascinating look at some of the mysteries of our world - Easter Island, the Pyramids, etc - but it's very heavily opinionated and comes off sounding kind of silly.

The question this doco poses is "Was God an Astronaut?" It's already convinced that God was, indeed, and astronaut (not an alien, mind you), and goes on to show us proof of this posit, rather than looking at what evidence there is, scientifically, and coming to a conclusion based on that.

There was an updated version of Chariots made for ABC TV in 1997, hosted by Home Improvement's Al, but it's not available on DVD. Even if it's all bullshit, it has to be better than the original.

1.5/5