For a film based on a true story, it could have been much better, much deeper, much more involving. This movie is overly simplistic, too straightforward. Everything is black or white, good or bad. Reality is never like this. A pity really, the premise is actually fascinating. The screenplay should have stuck much more to the truth, to actual events, they should have tried to portrait the characters faithfully, without trying to 'simplify' things for the viewer, to make the film more 'stylistically viable'.Oh yes, and this is one of the few movies (if not the only one) where Merryl Streeps presence was totally unnoticeable, if not unnecessary.

I was really shocked when I heard the Lu Gang incident which happened when I wasn't born yet. If Lu Gang is still alive he would be in my Father's age. And I searched the photo of Lu.Those glasses and hair style looks just like those in my father's old black-and-white photos. He entered the top one university-Beijing university and then get the chance of studying abroad which is invested by the government and is extremely rare. You can't imagine how lucky he was to earn the opportunity. And of course, this need plenty of effort to beat others in the competition. Similarly, my Father had a "American dream". He took the abroad-study program test,too. He failed it. Believe me, I know how hard-working my dad is. In those days, entering the university means a bright future. Studying abroad means a even brighter future. Lu was the elite among the elite but ended up like a monster. "It is also based on my own experience" as the director said. 1980s was just the time China had went through the darkest era and the dream of communist became totally a joke. Young people found that there are everything they ever wanted in the country across the sea. Liu Xing brought his obsession with math and his dream of wining Nobel prize to a foreign land. When he was just one step to his success, the professor ended his dream. This movie is not only about American academia but also about the burst of "American dream" of my father's generation.

Dark Matter is a neat little film about the promise and peril of being a Chinese graduate student at an American university. It gives you a peek inside the subculture of young Asians imported into the country in virtual indentured servitude to the careers and egos of middle-aged academics.Liu Xing (Liu Ye) is a brilliant math student who's come to the U.S. to study with renowned cosmology professor Jake Reiser (Aidan Quinn). He immediately put Xing to work and is impressed with the results, as long as they conform to Reiser's existing theories on the structure of the universe. Xing winds up living with two other Chinese graduate students, Little Square (Li Bo) and Old Wu (He Yu), and becomes friends with Joanna Silver (Meryl Streep), a rich man's wife who's fascinated with China and has become a patron of the constant stream of Chinese graduate students flowing into Professor Reiser's lab. Xing even develops a crush on a pretty townie (Taylor Schilling) who runs the local tea shop. He writes letters back to China telling his parents of how wonderful things are for him in America.But then things stop being so wonderful. Xing's academic career is stalled when his theories on so-called "dark matter" conflict with Professor Reiser's ideas and a much more Americanized student with the Americanized name of Laurence Feng replaces him on the fast track for a PhD. His townie girl crush tells Xing she just wants to be friends and he eventually ends up selling cosmetics door-to-door. But Xing's letters home remain and bright and cheerful as ever, covering up a black depression that explodes in a moment of violent insanity.Sadly reminiscent of a tragedy at the University of Iowa nearly 20 years ago, Dark Matter gently engages you in considering a cultural and economic phenomenon that's been around for so long, it's become a cliché. Asian graduate students in the sciences are so numerous, they've become a punch line on shows like Futurama. This film helps you to think of them as real people, the kind of people who want to make money, become Americans, go home or even win a Nobel Prize. It helps you to imagine what it's like to be stranded in a strange land, surrounded by your countrymen but still very much alone.The acting is also pretty good, though it's odd to see a Meryl Streep movie where she doesn't give the best performance. She's fine, but Joanna Silver's a fairly minor character who contributes more to the atmosphere of the film than she does to the plot. No, the standout actor here is definitely Aidan Quinn. Reiser is the linchpin on which Liu Zing's life turns and Quinn does an excellent job at showing how vanity and envy can dominate the minds of even the smartest men. Liu Ye and Lloyd Suh also draw such a wonderful contrast between the frustrated integrity of Liu Xing that eventually turns in on itself and the vacuous ambition of Laurence Feng that leads to reward, as it so often does in this unfortunate world.There are a lot of little things to enjoy in Dark Matter. From Reiser's feisty secretary Hildy (Blair Brown) to Xing's interactions with his roommates to Bill Irwin playing Hal Silver, the rich man who tries to tolerate his wife's involvement with the Chinese students. The only quibble I could have with it is that the movie does move very quickly from the beginning to the end of Xing's emotional implosion and it feels like there's about 10 or so minutes of the film that have been left out. A lot of the dialog is also in Chinese with subtitles, so you do have to accept that.All in all, though, I quite liked Dark Matter. It's a good little movie that deserves a gander.

I'm a programmer, have been for years. One of the first things you learn in programing is that using single precision numbers is generally frowned upon.If the main character had read the first fifteen pages of virtually any book on programming, he would have known this as well. Also, with use of "find/replace all" one could make the changes in code relatively simply and be on their way to a PHD. Generally this would involve changing the word "single" to "double" and, perhaps a few storage bit lengths.Therefore I cannot relate to the main character's motivation or this story.