What can I say?

Last night Stephen and I went to see Photon. It was Stephen's birthday and he chose this science-y sounding movie. (Poor Stephen just gets movie tickets from me, since his birthday is in the middle of Hot Docs every year.)

It is a tale of the universe. We have the big bang, matter, energy, protons.... a few billion years pass... eventually: life! Lots of microscope pictures, lots of computer simulations. I can hardly formulate a sentence about it!

I think the director (who not only directed but practically made the film single-handed) wanted to make a movie about his father, who had Parkinson's. So he starts from the atomic level to understand the brain, but in order to get to that, he had to describe the history of the universe.

Ambitious, for sure. Visually mind-boggling, for sure.

There was narration in English (the movie is originally in Polish, but the narration runs through the whole thing, so an English soundtrack was easy and better than subtitles) and it was quite deadpan and straight. Occasionally there was a bit of humour: space-time, for example, wrinkled up like a scrotum in winter.

Click the link above and scroll through the pictures to get to the trailer. It will give you a sorta-kinda idea of what went on. I'll just keep shaking my head and thinking about it!