Monday, May 4, 2009

Dark Matter (2007) Film Review - Meryl Streep

Plot Summary - Based around true incidents, this is the story of a brilliant young Chinese grad student (Ye Liu) in cosmology who arrives in the United States to study under successful professor Reiser (Aidan Quinn), expert on the early universe. Our student strikes out on his own with his theories on dark matter that seems to contradict Professor Reiser's theory, causing friction between the two and leading the professor to say he's "not a team player". Um - well, they won't let the student use his progressive new theory for his dissertation and all this leads to a rather surprising conclusion.

Review - I found this film slow going, but somewhat interesting - the ending surprised me and made this film seem a bit better. I recalled about half way through the film that this was supposedly based on true incidents - - one of my pet peeves: I don't like it when a film doesn't state at the *beginning* of the movie that it is based on a true story. Meryl Streep appears in this as the student's wealthy patron, a woman who seems rather obsessed with Chinese culture. Sort of boring as a whole, the film does have some nice music in the form of familiar songs performed by a Chinese children's chorus, plus a touch of humor (intended or not) as the group of Chinese students relate to each other (their conservations are mainly in Chinese with English sub-titles). Rating - 7/10 stars

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