Tuesday, July 7, 2009

Dark Matter (2008)

Gang LuImage via Wikipedia

I came across the movie "Dark Matter" last night as I was channel surfing and read the description and decided the plot sounded intriguing enough to watch. The movie is very loosely based on a Chinese physics student, Gang Lu, who attended the University of Iowa and shot and killed four faculty members, one student, and seriously wounded another student before taking his own life.
The movie was interesting and well acted, but I find it hard to believe it is based on the real life person Gang Lu because of how the main character is portrayed. They did change the name, which is good, because the movie tries to invoke a sense of sympathy for the killer and portray the faculty as trying to hold him back in his studies. It is almost as if the killer was justified in what he did and you feel sorry that he committed suicide. I think movies like this should be considered fiction and not based on the life of someone. The real life student wrote five letters in the months prior to the shooting explaining why he planned on shooting and killing the faculty members. This was not some rejected and depressed person being held back but a vengeful and calculating cold blooded killer, in my opinion. So if they are going to base a movie on a real life person, they should portray them as they really were and not some romanticized caricature.
So while the movie was artistic and very interesting, I am disturbed that a mass murderer is painted as the victim and the victims were deserving of what they got.
I would recommend the movie with the caution of do not take it as a biography of someone but rather a pure work of fiction.


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