For the DocUtah film festival I chose to attend Garwin with my father. Garwin was a documentary about a man by the name Richard Garwin who was considered a very highly respectable scientist from the time of president Eisenhower to recent days. He helped with the initial plans of the hydrogen bomb, was part of a panel(known as the "Jason's") that strategically planned many attacks in the Vietnam war, and also currently owns 43 patents on current technology one namely being the touch screen. The film was about his life and his accomplishments throughout the past 50 ears. I really enjoy films like these because getting even just a glimpse of these geniuses is always an exhilarating experience for me. Garwin was worldly renown for simply being a genius and was asked to participate in many worldly events for that mere fact alone. I find that very fascinating and I'll take any opportunity I can to get as close to it as possible.
      Though the story of Garwin was fascinating, the direction of this film was very poor. Ten minutes into the film you wanted to leave. It didn't develop the story well, the scenes were mostly long dramatic pauses of Garwin staring off into the snow, and they never actually noted any of the contributions that Garwin made to the projects, they just stated that he did. It was filmed with Garwin narrating the whole film while he went around and visited the old places he had lived while he was making many of his accomplishments. They would interview neighbors and colleagues that basically said over and over again just how smart he was. We got to see the apartments that he lived in while making the hydrogen bomb and the storage in which they kept the early forms of the bomb. Though we got to see all these interesting places, we never really got to know Garwin and the actual material that helped him in finding these many achievements he had in life. Although it was slow and boring, they did make a point to really illustrate the atomic bomb crisis and what the leading minds of the world had to say about it. Being that it was around seventy years ago now, we don't often here the political and moral arguments surrounding the conflict of whether America should use the atomic bomb. Obviously e chose to move forward in dropping the bomb, there were many scientist, even those who created it, that ere strongly against it actually being used in war. At the time of war Garwin was initially for the dropping of the atomic bomb, but in his later years he takes the stance that we should all eradicate atomic bombs as a whole and no longer let them be a factor on the world stage.
         The film itself did not make any point to give an opinion one way or another, they mainly interviewed many of those surrounding the events. Although Garwin grew to disagree with the use of the atom bomb many of his colleagues did not. There's one point in the film where one of the interviewed men states that all his high school friends had died in the war and if he had the chance to drop another bomb on the Japanese, he would do so. It definitely opened my eyes to the surrounding emotions this event must have evoked. I respect this style of documentary above all else, the form of simply interviews, stating facts on both sides of the issue, and coming to no common conclusion. Ultimately, letting the viewer decide what he or she thinks.