| Dark Matter | |
|---|---|
Theatrical release poster |
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| Directed by | Chen Shi-zheng |
| Produced by | Janet Yang Mary Salter Andrea Miller |
| Written by | Billy Shebar |
| Starring | Liu Ye Aidan Quinn Meryl Streep |
| Release date(s) | 2007 Sundance Film Festival April, 2008 |
| Running time | 90 min |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
Dark Matter is the first feature film by opera director Chen Shi-zheng, starring Liu Ye, Aidan Quinn and Meryl Streep. It won the Alfred P. Sloan Prize at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival.
Liu Ye plays a young scientist whose rising star must confront the dark forces of politics, ego, and cultural insensitivity. The film is based on true events.
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The film is loosely inspired by the true story of Gang Lu, a Chinese physics graduate student who killed four faculty members and one student at the University of Iowa. However, the story has substantial differences in plot and character motivation.
The film stars Liu Xing (Liu Ye) as a humble but brilliant Chinese student who arrives at Valley State University and makes a bumpy transition into American life with the help of Joanna Silver (Meryl Streep). Silver is a wealthy university patron who has a fascination with Chinese culture and takes a liking to Liu Xing. Xing joins a select cosmology group under the direction of his hero, the famous cosmologist Professor Jacob Reiser (Aidan Quinn). The group is working to create a model of the origins of the universe, based on Reiser's theory. Xing's enormous talent leads him quickly to become Reiser's protégé, and it seems that only hard work stands between him and a bright future in science.
Xing is obsessed with the study of dark matter, an unseen substance that he believes shapes the universe, and a theory that conflicts with the Reiser model. Xing makes scientific breakthroughs of his own which improve the Reiser model. Even though it would challenge Professor Reiser's work, Liu Xing proposes to research the dark matter "problem" for his doctoral dissertation. Reiser suggests to Xing that this type of research is too complicated and that he should pick a more simple dissertation topic.
Refusing to work with Xing, Reiser finds a new protégé in Feng Gang (Lloyd Suh), another Chinese student who was Xing's rival in undergraduate school in Beijing. Professor Reiser approves of Feng's dissertation proposal as it sticks to the Reiser model. Feng's English skills are far superior to his fellow Chinese students' and refuses to speak in Mandarin with them. Feng changes his name to Laurence and his wife changes her name to Cindy in order to be more American. Later on Laurence and Cindy have their child baptized in a local church.
Without the permission of Professor Reiser, Xing has a paper published in an astronomy journal. In a spiteful act, Reiser refuses to accept Xing's dissertation and does not allow him to receive his Ph.D.
At a graduation party for the Chinese students it is announced that Laurence Feng has won the university's science dissertation prize for that year. Joanna Silver urges Professor Reiser to do something to help Liu Xing. Reiser informs her that he has written a "very fine" recommendation for him.
With his dream of winning the Nobel Prize shattered, Xing finds work in selling beauty products. His roommate offers to try to help him find a job back in China but Xing refuses to leave. A few months pass and Xing mails all of the money he has earned to his parents in China.
No longer able to deal with the indignation, Xing returns to campus. He heads into an auditorium where Laurence Feng is giving a presentation to the cosmology department. Enraged by the way he was mistreated, Xing takes a revolver out of his coat and begins shooting. Feng is shot first in the face. Xing then turns to Reiser and fires a bullet into his former hero's forehead. While the audience is running for the door, Xing manages to shoot Professor Colby in the back. Xing finds the third member of his committee crawling on the floor and guns him down before he can escape.
After the shooting, Cindy Feng attempts to speak to Xing while he is leaving. Ignoring her, Xing makes his way to Professor Reiser's office and takes his own life.
No official soundtrack has been released. Here is a list of songs and production music featured in the film according to the end credits.[1]
So far, four pieces of music listed in the end credits cannot be identified. They could have been used in the said unidenfiable interval between 00:10:10 to 00:10:22 and 00:21:21 to 00:23:43. They are known as:
This film's general US release date, originally set for April 2007, was pushed back over a year because its plot line of an Asian student involved in a mass shooting on a US college campus too closely resembled the Virginia Tech massacre.[2] It was finally released in the US market in April 2008.
At the Sundance Film Festival in January, “Dark Matter,” a fictional account inspired by the shootings, won the Alfred P. Sloan Prize for the best feature film dealing with science or technology — “not a genre that attracts a lot of people to work on,” in the words of Brian Greene, a physicist, mathematician and author from Columbia University who was on the panel of judges.
Critics gave the film generally negative to mixed reviews. As of April 11, 2008, the review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes reported that 32% of critics gave the film positive reviews, based on 19 reviews.[3] Metacritic reported the film had an average score of 49 out of 100, based on 7 reviews.[4]
| Awards | ||
|---|---|---|
| Preceded by The House of Sand |
Alfred P. Sloan Prize Winner 2007 |
Succeeded by Sleep Dealer |