Year One (2009)

Harold Ramis's final film arrives with a cultural ledger so thin it could be read in a single sitting. Year One is a broad parody of Genesis, sending Jack Black and Michael Cera through the Stone Age and into Sodom, and its comedic ensemble is a solid wall of white performers. No casting decisions here suggest any curiosity about who else might inhabit the ancient world. The Sodomites exist for one joke, repeated until it stops being a joke, and that joke concerns sodomy as a threat rather than as a life. Queerness appears only as punchline, never as presence.

Two faint flickers deserve acknowledgment. Princess Inanna fasts in solidarity with her starving subjects and eventually takes the throne, a gesture toward female authority that the film treats with mild sympathy before returning to business as usual. The slave economy and the decadent king-priest class do get overturned by an angry, hungry crowd, which is a recognizable shape for an eat-the-rich parable. Neither thread carries weight. The famine is a device for riot and sacrifice, not an environmental argument. The uprising is slapstick with torches.

What remains absent is nearly everything else. There is no body positivity, no neurodivergence, no engagement with race, and no attempt to reframe antiquity in service of a modern thesis. This is parody, not revision. And it never lectures: Ramis and Apatow wanted laughs, and the laughs are crude, juvenile, and indifferent to meaning. Critics were unimpressed, and the box office was unkind. A sommelier would call this vintage thin, tannic, and best forgotten.