If you’re heading out to the movie theater this weekend, I wouldn’t recommend spending your money on “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed,” the latest attempt by the intelligent design movement to infiltrate science classrooms and labs with a decidedly unscientific idea.

The movie bills itself as a documentary, though as the New York Times review quite aptly put it, the film is more like “a conspiracy-theory rant masquerading as investigative inquiry.”

LiveScience staff writer Dave Mosher covered a press screening of the movie and mentioned some of the “highlights” of the piece, as well as some of the parts that scientists have found most egregious. (Our Bad Science columnist, Benjamin Radford, also weighed in.)

I attended the same screening, and while my expectations weren’t high to begin with, the film didn’t even succeed in meeting them.

The basic premise of the movie is that unwillingness of scientists to consider intelligent design as an equally scientific alternative to evolution is an assault on free speech and evidence that the “scientific establishment” is trying to suppress ideas like the communists in East Germany or the Nazis (I wish I were kidding). Ben Stein and the movie’s producers, as they would have it, are just fighting the man.

Their evidence for this notion is a parade of scientists (and one journalist) who were supposedly fired from their jobs for even daring to mention intelligent design. Scientific American’s editor-in-chief John Rennie mentions that these examples are all less-than-complete pictures of the truth in his review of the movie, (as does the National Center for Science Education at the their Web site, www.expelledexposed.com). One glaring example is the movie’s martyr, Richard Sternberg, who says he was fired from his job at the Smithsonian after publishing an article on intelligent design in the journal he was editing. What they don’t say is that Sternberg wasn’t an employee, rather he was an unpaid research assistant. And one of the main objects to the piece was that Sternberg reviewed it, which isn’t really kosher within the peer-review process.

Possibly the most tacky and shameful part of the movie is its attempt to link Darwinism (as they insist on calling the broader idea of evolution) to the Holocaust. Seriously. They do this by blatantly ignoring the distinction between social Darwinism and evolution as applied to speciation and some strategic misquoting of Darwin himself, as Rennie and Scientific American editor Steve Mirsky point out in their excellent “Six Things in Expelled That Ben Stein Doesn’t Want You to Know…”

After this unbelievably intellectually dishonest exercise, what stood out to me was the utter lack of science in a movie purportedly about the oppression of a “scientific” idea. I kept waiting and waiting for an explanation of either evolution or intelligent design, but the movie made only the lamest attempt at defining either idea. Instead viewers are treated to a rapid succession of black-and-white clips of Nikita Khrushchev, the Berlin Wall being torn down, and Ben Stein walking around Seattle looking for the Discovery Institute (the ideological center of the ID movement), while muttering, “We’re sooo lost.” I’ll say.

We’ve explained the ideas in modern evolutionary theory (and the premise of intelligent design) on our site. For an explanation of evolution (and some of the varying ideas about it), you can read this article or this one. For a discussion of intelligent design, check out this piece.

In particular, the movie equates current evolutionary theory with Darwin’s original work, calling it not evolution, but Darwinism. The term is outdated at best, intentionally inflammatory at worst. As Rennie points out in his piece, “in modern biology almost no one relies solely on Darwin’s original ideas.” The science has advanced a little since then …

I could really go on and on, but frankly I don’t think this movie is worth it. Instead, you can check out Richard Dawkins’ review and biologist and blogger PZ Myers’ take on the film (both were interviewed for the movie, though under what they say were false pretenses).