I was empathetic toward Ye Liu for the first 75 minutes; it's like he just couldn't catch a break. It's not uncommon for genius and mental illness to co-exist, but jeez, did he have to do what he did?
Very loosely based on (the then) 28-year-old Gang Lu and the University of Iowa shooting on November 1, 1991. The former graduate student killed four members of the university's faculty and a student; he left another student seriously injured, before committing suicide.
This film is loosely (emphasis there) based on those events, but do we really need to see a school shooting? Yes, I think so. There were other options he could have explored, but then that wouldn't be much a movie now would it? Ironically it is the ending that allowed me to give Dark Matter the 6 stars that I did. I knew nothing about this movie before I watched it, but I was waiting for something to kick off – the plot summary just says he "reacts violently". I was getting a little bored before the end. I mean, I get it, he feels no one understands him, people are holding him back, or don't like him, or both...blah, blah, blah. He's like Gil Gunderson of The Simpsons: he just can't catch a break, poor guy. Well, you can only push a man so far.
I can see what the director, Shi-Zheng Chen, was doing with the constant disappointments in Liu's life. Chen really wanted us to feel for Liu, and to understand him. Perhaps he did this to help us make sense of Liu's senseless actions?
Art imitating life, imitating art. Or whatever.
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