Movie review: Particle Fever takes you inside the Large Hadron Collider

The Large Hadron Collider is science on a grand scale: 27 kilometers of tunnel, building-sized detectors, data centers around the world, and thousands of engineers, physicists, and support staff to run the machine and sift through the massive amount of data it generates. It's also big in another dimension: time. It took years to build, had some false starts before it got running, and generated several years' worth of data before its summary achievement—the signal of the Higgs boson—rose high above background noise.

It's hard to put all of that into any sort of neat, compact narrative, much less one that's accessible to the general public. The people behind the film Particle Fever have tried and, remarkably, seem to have largely succeeded.

To make things manageable, the film focuses on just a handful of the cast of thousands that built and now run the LHC. Some of them are experimentalists; we see one named Monica Dunford in work gear and a hardhat, spending time on the detector, and later exulting when the machine fires up and all that work pays off: "First of all, I just have to say: data. It's unbelievable how fantastic data is." She also warns the unseen and unheard interviewer about some of the other characters that are interviewed for the film. "Hope the theorists aren't driving you crazy," Dunford says to the camera. "Don't listen to them, by the way."