Review of Dark Matter (2008) by Chance F — 11 Mar 2010

A film about how brilliance is often times ignored when it cannot be understood.

It fell short in its execution on several accounts. For one, Meryl Streep was more of a tertiary character, and that was disappointing.

For two, it seemed to move too fast, skipping over crucial plot points to focus more on unnecessary dialogue, such as Liu Xing's parents talking about what they've heard about America. There should have been more focus on the rivalry between Liu Xing and Laurence Feng in their attempts to win the praise of their professor Jacob Reiser. Instead, it started out with Xing being Reiser's protege. Then Joanna Silver (Meryl Streep) mentions to her husband that there's a new Chinese student at the school named Feng who was 2nd to Xing at their school in Beijing and that they were rivals there. Then, Feng is suddenly taken under Reiser's wing, and Xing seems to be forgotten about entirely. But we don't see any of the struggle or the emotion of this, which makes the ending come as a complete shock.

But it also seemed to drag in parts that should have moved quickly.

It could have been an excellent movie. The beginning was great. The ending was perfect. But somewhere in between, for a very long period of time, it died, which caused this to be just an okay to good film.