ShiiStyle

It's not clear what the point of this video is. Although representatives of both Pantex and protesters are interviewed, the director prefers to interview local eccentrics at great length. How is an Amarillo man's trips to various countries relevant to the storage of disassembled nuclear weapons? I have met an eccentric like him in another town; does it prove something about the nature of the town? Consider that Amarillo has a population of 200,000! It seems like the creator wanted to create a cartoonish image of thousands of ignorant locals and an evil corporation that manipulates them. The documentary presents no evidence that this is the reality of the situation. I'm sure the good people of Amarillo consider the town portrayed in this video to be unrecognizable.

The main focus of this film is the interaction of scientists with the LHC and its data. Many shots are either banter in the CERN offices or YouTube-like video contributions from scientists themselves. Basically, it adds a human element to what you might read in the news. The engineering of the LHC is scarcely touched upon, and while the film (directed by a physicist) attempts to explain the consequences for particle physics, its dramatized overview is not really accurate; the viewer would be advised to read Lee Smolin's book "The Trouble With Physics". The substitution of pictures of difficult-looking math equations for real scientific exposition became irritating. Furthermore, while we see people interacting with each other in a superficial way, the film doesn't really dig into the culture of theoretical physics -- for example, I enjoyed a shot where physicists discuss how rumors are displacing older methods of data distribution like the arXiv, but the context of this discussion was not given and I worried most of the audience would not understand it.

I subtract four stars for lack of depth and would probably extract more, except that the screening I went to had an interview with the director afterwards, and I realized from him that it was quite difficult for this documentary to achieve what it did. The science the LHC produces comes in the form of millions of spreadsheets full of numbers, which must be analyzed by thousands of experimental physicists sitting at computers around the world. It is rather hard to make a long documentary film about people analyzing numbers on computers. The director made a number of clever stylistic decisions, like mainly interviewing people who were physically present at the CERN buildings, and separating the segments of experimental and theoretical physicists. To get theoretical physics onto the big screen in a thoughtful and entertaining way is really an accomplishment in itself. It was also pointed out that the documentary skillfully focused on a few likable subjects among many to give a hint of the vast size of the project. All in all, the film is a decent portrayal of the kind of willpower and teamwork that is needed on a project the size of the LHC, but don't go to it expecting to gain a very deep knowledge of today's physics or the scientific community.

Obviously this film is not the worst film ever. Camera work, actors, setting, even concept were all great. I could award it 5 stars out of 10 just to be fair. But in the days after watching it, the essential lie of the plot has been bugging me more and more, and I've started to outright detest it.

All of the good elements of this film can be found in the book "All Creatures Great and Small" by James Herriot. The down-on-his-luck virtuoso who goes to the countryside, visits many different kinds of families, and has to work for a forgetful and self-contradictory old man who in the end teaches him a lot about life. It's all there, so neglect this movie if you can and give that a read instead.

I know, what about the death part? Isn't that the real beauty of the movie? How death becomes an important moment of parting?

No... it looks beautiful, but that's the lie of the film. Consider that this guy's job is literally putting lipstick on a corpse. Yes, that sounds unpoetic and insulting to the film, but that's not an exaggeration. That's literally what he does.

All the bodies in this film appear to have keeled over and expired without injury. Real life corpses are not always so lucky. The suffering of death cannot always be whitewashed over like this. The traditional Buddhist meditation on death is on the destruction of the body, the disgusting things that happen when bodies decay. This film is doing something evil. It tells us to purchase a pound of make up and await the perfect funeral, when we can cry out our unresolved conflicts. Funerals are not meant to be perfect. Death in real life is not as convenient as it is to the plot of this film.

The ancients had death all around them, from untreated disease or violence. It is we of the 21st century who have no understanding of what it means for a life to have an end. The film gives a little taste of that during funeral scenes, but in such a warped way. It dresses up and masks the end so we can imagine that all our bodies can be cleaned up and exhibited with such dignity. The friends and relatives of the character, who exhibit distress over his choice of work, are correctly showing the cultural reaction of a traditional society that understands that a dead body is something apart from society. The film has no patience or sympathy for this reaction. It is portrayed as stupid, ignorant bigotry.

The reverse is true. We are the ones who are stupid and ignorant for inventing the false image of death portrayed in this film. The lie of the camera is so embedded into the fabric of this movie that I cannot justify giving it a good review.