Review by Cameron Maitland

Perhaps the hardest type of documentary to make is a scientific one. It must not only worry about being artistic and interesting, but also avoid the pitfalls of being incomprehensible or a glorified educational film. Thankfully, writer/directors Clayton Brown and Monica Long Ross’ film The Atom Smashers so masterfully balances these elements it could almost be the archetype against which all other science docs are measured.

The film documents a year and a half in the life of Fermilab, an Illinois lab containing (at the time) the world’s premiere particle accelerator, and the lab’s attempt to find the infamous Higgs Boson particle. With recent events in the scientific community, it’s easy to tell this story quickly turns into a race to find the particle with Fermilab becoming the underdog to the European Large Hadron Collider and the results becoming their chance to justify more funding from an imposing conservative U.S. Government.

The film’s real success though is not relying simply on the easy thrills of this end of the story. It instead focuses just as hard on the day-to-day lives of a few physicists involved and tries to understand the socio-cultural perception of science and how that shaped the past, present and future of Fermilab and its operation. The film deftly switches gears between these elements of the story often and suggests certain artistry in the link between the elements that tends to go missing from the general views of science.

The Atom Smashers succeeds because it’s not simply a film made for the Discovery Channel by scientists about science but instead a film made by real artists, passionate about science and trying to capture all the ideas, struggles and joys the process of scientific discovery can bring.

The Atom Smashers
Clayton Brown & Monica Long Ross | USA | 2008 | 81min