Reader Recommends: The Scientist (2010)

A good friend of mine suggested that I watch The Scientist, so today, while entertaining friends, I mentioned it and we decided to throw it on and see what it was all about. I had been warned that this was a slow movie, and that it was all for a pay off at the end. It had been described as a "thinking man's" movie to me. This sounded pretty good to us. I liked movies like Primer and The Man From Earth so I thought this would be another to add to that list of interesting indie movies that are more about the thought experiment than anything else. If you want to hear my thoughts, just take a jump to the other side.


The story of this movie is a hard one to nail down. The film has very little dialog and most of what I could figure out is just from small hints and clues and the images that are shown. We follow Dr. Marcus Ryan (Bill Sage) who is described as a brilliant physicist. 3 years ago, in events never explained, Marcus lost his wife and daughter; he has never recovered from the loss. His only contact with the outside world is through his only friend Dr. Alan Reed (Adam LeFevre), a professor at the university Marcus used to work at. Otherwise, he spends most of his time in the basement working on his mystery machine. If he can just get it to work, it could change everything!

Marcus is driven to the point of madness with his obsession with his mystery machine

On paper, the description of this movie sounds pretty good. He's clearly making this machine to some how get his wife and child back, but how can it do that? Several times in the movie a side character will make an ever so brief mention of Marcus' past work and theories about multiple dimensions. Watching the film with friends meant that with every little hint, even the slightest drop of knowledge had us guessing widely as to what he might be trying to do. This is, of course, do to one unavoidable fact; we had no idea what was going on.

When I said the film has little dialog, I wasn't kidding. There are very large chunks of the movie where not one word is spoken. It's really pretty boring and the visuals of what is going on rarely are enough to explain what's happening. For example, Marcus makes this machine, which is never shown in full, only in close up chunks, and it mostly is just this thing that spins. Then he starts getting what seem like powers, but it's not totally clear what's going on. Is he seeing the future, does he have super healing, can he hear through walls? It wasn't only a few times that my friends and I were left wondering "What's going on?"

Marcus' only friend Alan is concerned about his failure to recover after the loss of his wife & daughter

It isn't until the very end of the movie that it kinda becomes clear what happens. Even still, the movie didn't make much sense. It seemed like someone just had a short story about a scientist who has this weird thing happen to him, and then stretched it out into a full movie by filling the first hour and ten minutes with a bunch of nothing and some navel gazing.

I don't think I'd lay much blame on the actors, they seemed to do alright with what then had, there just really wasn't much to work with even to start with. Actually I kinda liked the friend played by Adam  LeFevre. The main lead, Bill Sage, was kinda hit and miss sometimes. I feel like that may have been more the director's fault, not being able to give him a clear way to act in this movie full of nothing.

Unless you like really weird movies, like maybe Avalon then I don't think you'll find this one enjoyable. Some people may say that the film is worth it for the ending, but while the ending was a definite WTF just happened moment, neither I, nor my friends thought it was worth the terrible pacing and non-existance storytelling of the rest of the film.