Hulkeasexo it is the rare 'crazy' movie that actually has something to say.

Gurlyndrobb While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

Sanjeev Waters A movie that not only functions as a solid scarefest but a razor-sharp satire.

Zandra The movie turns out to be a little better than the average. Starting from a romantic formula often seen in the cinema, it ends in the most predictable (and somewhat bland) way.

gavin6942 Physicists are on the cusp of the greatest scientific discovery of all time -- or perhaps their greatest failure.As someone who is not a physicist (or even a scientist), but has an interest in physics, this film did a great job of laying out the before and after events of the Large Hadron Collider's search for the Higgs. Others may want more science in their science documentaries, but for a novice like myself, explaining the roles of experimentalists and theorists was very helpful.Professor Peter Higgs makes a cameo, as he should, but it seems unfortunate he did not have a bigger role in this film. In an indirect way, he is sort of the subject, being one of the original minds that launched this search.

rsignal Wow, this movie is a poster child for what's wrong with big budget science. At the beginning they show clips of conservative members of congress, who are arguing that the American version of CERN should be defunded. I'm sure this was intended to be a hit/slam, but I found myself agreeing with the politicians. For the record, I'm a science geek, with a degree in engineering, who reads books about quantum mechanics for fun (David Deutsch in particular is my favorite author).The female lead, well, she was super-impressed by a 5 story structure. Kaplan, one of the male leads, comes off as very unlikable, although I warmed up to him by the end of the movie. Then there's the guy who won't collaborate with more than 2 colleagues, but Nobel prizes can only be given to a most 3 people. Great, this guy's ego is so big that he'll sacrifice science to protect his reputation. There's very little science here beyond what's in the headlines. Basically, all this money was spent on CERN, they were expecting the Higgs to be in one of two places, but they found something (it must be the Higgs!) in a different place, therefore it's pretty much back to the drawing board. Perhaps science is at its limits - but you know what, Einstein didn't need an expensive CERN to know that general relativity was true. Yes, something is WAY off here, and this movie just solidifies that for me.I'd give this movie more stars if it could actually tell me WHY a Higgs imparts mass to other particles (or anything interesting!) because the personalities of the people they interviewed were simply not interesting to me.

TxMike The Large Hadron Collider, or LHC, has been in the works for over 20 years, from concept to construction to operation. This is one of those projects that cannot be described in monetary terms, i.e. "cost/benefit." No, it is one of those fundamental experimental projects that will hopefully uncover new insights into sub-atomic particle Physics and allow us to better explain how our universe works.The LHC has many goals, but an early primary goal was to experimentally verify the Peter Higgs theory that there must exist a heavy particle called a "boson", usually referred to as the Higgs boson, which is the linchpin for all other particles. The only way to possibly observe it is to bombard the small particles at very high energies and using giant, sophisticated specialty detectors look at the resulting new particles and their energies. When I first learned this film is more than 90 minutes long I wondered why. But I found out as I watched it, instead of being a dry scientific and engineering account of the LHC, much of the film featured several of the Physicists either working directly to build it or working secondarily to analyze data and interpret results. Overall I found it to be a good balance, to learn more about the people and what kinds of thoughts and apprehensions they had as zero hour approached.As the film documents, all went fine and the LHC began working as designed ... until a rather catastrophic failure resulted in a leak and the destruction of some of the critical parts of the LHC. It had to be shut down for several months and repaired, all before it was able to generate any useful data.Then, in 2011 and 2012, after it started up and ran fine, the critical experiments were performed, and the results were presented to a small live audience and the worldwide audience by teleconference and TV. Two competing theories had established that the boson will have a mass of either 115 GEV or 140 GEV. When the massive amount of data was analyzed and verified to 5 sigma, meaning the chance of an incorrect result was less than about 1 in 3 million, the Higgs boson was discovered, at a mass of about 125 to 126. Almost right in the middle of the two predicted either/or values.So that opens up a potentially totally new and exciting set of theories about how the universe was formed and how it behaves. Hopefully after the LHC is set up to run at full design power, new data will shed additional light on the issue. I can't wait!It was a joyous sight to see Peter Higgs himself at the news conference announcing the results. One can only imagine how he must have felt, after so many years and so much effort seeing his ground-breaking theoretical work verified.

eyal philippsborn If there's one thing I learned at particle fever, it's probably the fact that Phyiscs is not what I learned in high school. The Physics I studied (and failed miserably) was the calculator of light rays and gravity forces. The real Physics, the one some people choose as their livelihood is, quite literally, a universe away. Some might say multi-verse away. But I'm jumping ahead of myself. The focus of the movie- the Hydron collider in Switzerland is a project according to all projections, should never have materialized. Its costs sky-rocketed to five billion pounds, it took almost twenty years to build and a few more years to overcome glitches (and when you build a seven mile long tunnel to run beams in the speed off light, glitches are inevitable) and it's functional and commercial uses are, as of today, non-existent. It's hard to persuade people to allocate money and time just to get a replay of the big bang. Alas, it's not the Hedron's goal.I'm still jumping ahead.Physics is the most pretentious of scientific fields. Its purpose is to compose the great manual of the universe. A tough assignment considering no one knows how it works, how long it will work or if it was intentionally premeditated to work. CERN, The ultimate place of worship for all physicists, takes the wild theories of the universe and with high powered, heavily documented and shockingly susceptible device, puts them to the test. The one test that CERN failed to anticipate is the test of the real world. When one operate a gigantic, costly collider, you need press coverage, in order to do that, CERN must provide insights. Keeping the experiments clandestine, isolate CERN from the media, making them public, lead to rushed tests that more often than not, fail and alienate the press even more. Apparently, the world outside the Hedron collider is as vicious as the Collider itself.Of course, the Hedron collider overcame all its initial difficulties and supplied the world with shocking insights that leave many questions unanswered. One that, in my opinion, looms over all the rest, is whether or not this manual of the universe was authored or generated by circumstances. In other words, is there a big guy upstairs or is this universe one big exercise in probability. This movie makes you think. beyond the colorful and diverse types of physicists, it projects an image of the universe and forces us to redefine perspective. Now, that's quite an accomplishment for a modest documentary. Don't expect the movie to be easy. It's not for the Physics majors but it's also not digested to be user-friendly. Manuals never are. 8 out of 10 in my FilmOmeter