The Believers (2012) User Reviews

Good, but...

[elienation-33580 · 7/10 · 18 May 2016]

Attended a film festival where The Believers was screening some years back, going in with more than decent knowledge about Cold Fusion and familiarity with nearly all the people interviewed.

It was a good film in that it brought attention to LENR, aka Cold Fusion. Seeing the players involved was very interesting, especially Martin Fleischmann as this is probably the last footage of him before he passed away. Some unnecessary segues and such, but still good to see/hear him.

The film wasn't the leaning towards positive attention many had hoped for, and felt the subject rightfully deserved. The filmmakers wanted to play the typical middle of the road card, even refusing to give their personal take on Cold Fusion during the Q and A session, which the audience in attendance found frustrating.

Maybe understandable for other subjects, but since Cold Fusion has been dogged for so incredibly long, with a volatile history of ending careers undeservedly and a host of other injustices, it really deserved a lot more.

Since this science has the potential for much needed world changing energy capabilities, the middle of the road approach should have been replaced with stressing all the strong evidence towards Cold Fusion being a reality, instead of building on the confusion that has already existed for the past twenty years. This back and forth "yay VS nay" has already been played out to death throughout the 90's and a better advancing of the subject would've been more deserving.

The title of the film was indeed unfortunate. "The Believers". We are well passed the "believing" stage. Scientists have worked hard to establish enough evidence to get out of that label, and in that sense the movie felt dated by placing them back in that bubble.

Nevertheless I think it is definitely worth seeing, well put together and a good look at some of the people involved and the back story overall, especially the injustices Pons and Fleischmann suffered throughout the years.

Excellent Review of the Situation

[crowx-98124 · 7/10 · 10 March 2022]

It bothers me deeply that the top review for this movie is a conspiracy theorist. We discussed this movie for my chemistry in ethics kapstone course as a perfect example of bad science. This is a story about two scientists that went in way over their heads when they attempted to go into a field they had no experience or knowledge in with Absolutely ZERO control experiments. They went to the public with absolutely no peer-reviewing because they wanted to patient their "discovery" when in reality they just didn't know how to use typical equipment in this new field they were trying to enter (nuclear physics). "LENR" is not a real field of science. The only two published papers relating to cold fusion have been systematically debunked and considered fraudulent. The only experiment they ran lacked any controls. If you fuse two deuteriums together, you get exactly the same reaction as if you fuse two normal hydrogens together. There's no such thing as "Cold nuclear fusion". None of the physics line up for that to even be possible and any nuclear psychists would dismiss these claims. What do you do when you get caught in a lie that rewarded you with millions of dollars? Anchor down! Keep the money because your career is already in shambles anyway...

I wanted to like it

[ruby-87303 · 3/10 · 24 April 2016]

Some topics for documentary require years of research and investigation. Cold fusion is one of them.

The science is difficult, there is currently no usable technology, and the field is plagued by myths, rhetoric, and decades-old misinformation which these film-makers, sadly unaware, repeat throughout the film.

The Believers movie attempts to document the early controversy in the aftermath of the cold fusion announcement - without taking sides, and ends up as a depressing portrait of the man who co-founded one of the greatest discoveries of the twentieth-century in his waning days of illness.

I had to turn away from watching Martin Fleischmann undress in a doctor's appointment, an intrusion that should have been edited out.

The directors have stated emphatically they are not trying to determine any truth about cold fusion. In the movie, they show only the YEA or NAY comments from early participants. Unfortunately the back-and-forth effort confuses more than enlightens as uninformed opinion is weighted the same as informed conclusion. The cold fusion controversy can not be understood with such binary simplicity.

Disjoint editing (for instance where a character shows up near the end with a message of doom with no introduction to who he is) leave one unsettled.

The directors further put success on the defense with the criticisms of Robert Park, former spokesperson for the American Physical Society and grand wizard for exorcising any thing related to cold fusion from government or agency sessions in the early days. He didn't want to know the science then, or since, though he sits royally in a high-boy chair repeating the same falsehoods from 28 years ago that go unchallenged.

The title of the movie itself was a derogatory term applied to cold fusion researchers shortly after the mainstream physics community, led by Steven Jones, voted by a show of hands at the American Physical Society meeting on May 1, 1989 - just six weeks after the announcement - that "cold fusion was dead". The "Believers" (cold fusion researchers who wanted to find the truth behind the anomalous effects) did not follow science, but were "delusional".

Naming the movie The Believers was the first sign that this film was not the definitive portrait I had hoped for. It juxtaposes a collision of voices, reducing this epic mainstream scientific Fail to pink noise, a palatable state for current science establishment consumption.

These capable film-makers can make a good science film, but this isn't one of them. The stunning story of Martin Fleischmann, Stanley Pons and the discovery they made has yet to be told and the depth of the narrative will require more than the sheer veneer of investigation.

The Believers movie is a tragedy of a tragedy and best viewed as Menippean.

An original review by me titled "Marvin Hawkins in the Believers: I will defend them at every turn" looks at the parallels between this movie and classical Greek tragedy.

When Open Minded becomes Air Headed- intellectual dishonesty in Journalism

[carlp-imdb · 4/10 · 20 April 2016]

I've seen this back in 2013 at a film festival and was disappointed.

The film-makers wanted to make a film about the human condition. They wanted to show an amusing portrait of a cult of "Believers", misfits embarked on a quest of pseudoscience. For some reason they chose the people who study LENR aka "cold fusion" as their circus clowns.

Unlike 60 Minutes or countless peer-reviewed journals, the film-makers made no attempt to validate the claims, or find people who could.

At this point in time, it is true that the consensus in plasma physics is decidedly against believing any LENR claims. Trouble is these claims are all subject to confirmation by physical evidence. It is dishonest to pretend that you have studied an issue, and pretend doubt without attempting to look at any evidence.

Science is not a consensus sport or a democracy. Nature's evidence, as observed using proper instruments and statistics, is all we know.

The LENR field has been accumulating evidence since 1989. During the early years many of the experiments were hard to replicate. They acted like slot machines-- working really unambiguously once in awhile at unpredictable times. Today the best researchers can build predictable demonstrations, but not at commercially viable output levels. It would be great to have a film that would public in a cogent conversation.

LENR advocates are not "believers". They are people who trust instruments, measurements and statistics, as oft reported by people of good reputation under reasonable incentives. They have noted an unexpected pattern emerge from many observations. They have labored to better characterize it and explain the evidence theoretically.

LENR workers get a lot of skeptical flak from people who think they are scientists but are really mathematicians who love theory so much that they don't feel a need to listen to nature's voice anymore. Mathematicians are entitled to invent their own neat universes. Scientists are obligated to study this one.

"The Believers" was made back in 2012. And this will be the first chance most people got to see it.

Taking 4 years to get a mediocre documentary out to the public isn't the mark of people who care much about the world. They were obviously trying to surf the wave of publicity now building up, starting with today's Popular Mechanics article, despite the movie being made years earlier and having nothing to contribute of today's evidence.

The film is a standard Journalist wimp-out. Truth is not their business. Just get people who disagree to talk past each other and let the audience go away as confused as they came. Is there a difference between open-minded and air-headed? It is not as good as 60 Minutes, but longer and more informative.

The video does have some high points. Mike McKubre says very useful things. And the character assassination of Pons and Fleischmann gets some attention.

I think most fair minded people and scientists will get some feeling that repeatable experiments cannot be suppressed for ever. I note that the skeptics highlighted in the movie have books, and the supporters have laboratories. That's typical. Too bad the movie abandons intellectual honesty to try to portray the situation as uncertain.

There is a lot to be done to understand the exact physical mechanism of LENR. But the inputs and outputs from a chemistry perspective have been quantitatively known for a decade. Soon the physics will also be worked out, but that requires more work and more gear and more collaboration than private enterprise can muster. Hopefully the US Govt will follow the Japanese and CERN and restore an appropriate level of funding soon.