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.
