Just watching The Most Unknown for 88 minutes should raise your IQ by one or two points - as long as you avoid the caramel-corn-flavored vodka cocktails at the multiplex. The conversation is stimulating in a way that, say, Deadpool 2 is not. That particular segment seems a bit ridiculous, but the microbial ecologists, astrobiologists, neuroscientists, geobiologists, and cognitive psychologists we hear from are generally engaged in serious studies of basic questions about life on this planet. “There is so much more matter in the universe than we have realized so far.” D’Angelo gets that animated, obsessive look in his eyes, and suddenly we’re on the threshold of yet another science-fiction adventure.įrom there, the wide-ranging, open-ended discussion travels to Brussels, the Black Rock Desert of Nevada (no, not for Burning Man), the slopes of Mauna Kea volcano in Hawaii, the United Kingdom, Colorado, the bottom of the ocean, and Cayo Santiago, a tiny island in the Caribbean inhabited solely by various species of monkeys being studied for their perception of social situations. “It’s moving through us, through our bodies,” explains D’Angelo. In simple terms, it’s the glue that holds the universe together, and it is fiendishly difficult to observe, a basic component of the universe that we know very little about.
In a research center inside a mountain, beneath 1,800 meters of rock, we get an inkling of why dark matter matters to humankind. Take molecular biologist Jennifer Macalady, whose spelunking takes her deep into slippery underground caverns to collect slime - not just any slime, but organisms important to the study of the origins of Earth.Īfter a little time in the lab, Macalady then travels to the Italian Alps to talk to Davide D’Angelo, a physicist whose specialty is dark matter, one of the big unknowns in particle physics.
#The most unknown movie part 2 full#
A movie almost never follows one of them to get her or his full story, until now. These are the sort of characters we typically meet for one or two short scenes in a horror or sci-fi film, brought in to explain some scary phenomenon to the hero, and also to us. What a brave framework for mass-market entertainment. It’s all very talky and courageously nerdy - a scientific game of tag. The second scientist then visits a third, the third a fourth, and so on, until a daisy chain of nine curious scientific minds has been heard from.
The scope of inquiry is always the study of classic unanswered questions: How did life begin? What is consciousness? And so on. A camera crew follows a scientist as they visit another scientist in a related field to talk about the second scientist’s work. Case in point: Ian Cheney’s The Most Unknown, a thinking person’s indie swimming against the tide of candy-flavored summer blockbusters.įilmmaker Cheney’s concept is deceptively simple. Or maybe, just maybe, moviegoers have decided to latch onto some of the imaginatively produced, newsworthy docs on the market. Perhaps it’s due to audiences getting tired of endless sequels. Movie business reports tell us that documentaries are more popular than ever, relatively speaking. A slime hunter at work in The Most Unknown.
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