This movie was so-so. It had it's moments, but wasn't the greatest.

This film is so real. It treats its characters with so much care and sensitivity.

Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

Actress is magnificent and exudes a hypnotic screen presence in this affecting drama.

Other reviews suggested this film was based on a French novel. If so, I have not read it and have no intention to. I watched this film strictly as a stand-alone entity, not knowing much about its background and its director, Oskar Roehler. I watched it out of a liking for international cinema, hoping I would land a good one. And I did.One can argue this is a serious film, on a popular subject: love and its impact on life. Apart from some minor 'imperfections', e.g. the physical resemblance of the brothers played by different actors portraying them in youth and adulthood, with one done right and the other out of whack, I find the film was very well done and it commanded my attention throughout all its 112 minutes.Perhaps it strikes a chord with intellectuals - one brother is a renowned physicist and the other an academic. It is a film that engages you and makes you think and try to get inside the minds of the protagonists, played as two half-brothers with entirely opposite life styles. One more likable than the other.I enjoyed this film greatly, and regarded it one of the few, memorable German films I have seen in recent years.

I enjoyed this adaptation way more than the book, which -- despite all the pseudo-intellectual hype that was raised about it -- was mainly about pornography, perversion, and a "philosophy" that can be formulated in short as: unless you are perfect, beautiful and brilliant, better kill yourself. And even if you are, there is ample reason to get depressed.By the way, it is not true that the director didn't try to talk to Houellebecq. But when he did the latter was seriously under drugs and hard to communicate with.In contrast, this film surely picked out some of the more digestible parts of the book and luckily didn't portray the characters as if they were only some of God's worst jokes. What came out was a beautiful and intelligent story about life, human relationships, and the choices that we face between keeping up love even under difficult conditions or, instead, going the seemingly easy way and losing everything.If that doesn't sound depressing enough for you, better go and buy the book...

Bernd Eichinger and Oskar Roehler messed it up. Completely. How that was even possible considering Houellebecqs brilliant novel is unbelievable. They just made completely shallow, awful melodramatic crap out of what can be considered probably the single most important and greatest novel that world literature has seen at the turn from the 20th to the 21st century. This film is unbearable for all who have read and understood the book that undoubtedly is as deeply philosophical as it is scandalous, provoking and moralizing.Eichinger and Roehler stated at the 2006 Berlinale, where the movie premiered: "YOU CANNOT FILM SOCIAL CRITICISM, YOU CAN ONLY FILM MELODRAMS." (Eichinger) "THE UTTERLY FATALISTIC RESUMEE OF THE BOOK COULD NOT BE USED. WE DID NOT WANT TO ADOPT HOELLEBECQ'S MORALE." (Roehler) Besides that, they claimed the novel to be too pornographic to be filmed without major changes. They also frankly admitted not to have had any contact with Houellebecq.These statements and the attitude behind them are shocking, disgusting and can only serve as a negative example for all film-makers. They can only be adequately qualified with the facit: FILMING A NOVEL - HOW YOU MUST NOT DO IT.Luckily, there are some brilliant films, which prove all the points claimed by Eichinger and Roehler completely wrong: You can film social criticism and not produce shallow melodramas, as proved for example by Harron's wonderful "American Psycho" (from the Bret Easton Ellis Novel). You can translate the pornographic of a novel into a film without censoring it as proves Despentes' magnificent "Baise-moi!" (from Despentes' identically titled novel). You can adopt a completely fatalistic resumee of a novel in a film as proved by Radford's adorable "1984" (from the famous George Orwell Novel).It is exactly when this happens, that excellent novels are translated into excellent films. Eichinger and Roehler never had the intention to do so, nor would their abilities have been sufficient to do so, even if they had wanted. So, they had to produce this catastrophe now unjustifiedly bearing the name "Elementarteilchen". They failed as drastically as it is possible.

Sometimes the ultimate disappointment is when a movie turns out exactly as expected. My expectation had been that given the ensemble of well-established German movie stars, this adaptation of Michel Houellebeques micro-scandalous "Elements particulaires" would be heavy on the contrived plot but fail to provide the sleaze and grime that was the sole reason to read the original novel. Just how scandalous can a movie become that stars Moritz Bleibtreu, Franka Potente, and Martina Gedeck? You name it.Not that sleaze could have saved this movie; it surely couldn't save the novel. Both collapse under the weight of a story that is ridiculous in its contrivance. (SPOILERS AHEAD). There are two half-brothers. One is a suicidal sex maniac who fabricates racist pamphlets, masturbates on his pupils' homework essays, and falls in love with a swinger-club co-swinger. Unfortunately, this love of his life first becomes quadroplegic, then commits suicide. The second brother is a scientist disinterested in sex, but he also meets a woman who also lands in hospital (at least they both stay alive). Her former lover became a mass murderer in a satanic sect, by the way; not that it matters. Two more women die, in fact, providing the movie with an acceptable body count.So that's how much plot is needed to lament how sex spoils our lives. If all this sounds ridiculous, wait to see how the two brothers solve their problems. One lands in a psychiatric ward where he can hallucinate about his deceased lover. You figure he will never write nazi prose or set foot in a swinger club again, so we can be happy for him. The other guy finds out how to clone humans so that sex is no longer needed in the first place; as a result, world peace ensues. I don't make this up.Houellebecqs novel sort of worked for two reasons. First, because of the sheer exploitation value of the book, the sleaze factor. Second, because of a certain frankness and urgency that Houellebecq brought to this work (his subsequent books became more and more formulaic, right down to the unaccepatable "Platform"). Director/Screenwriter Oskar Roehler grossly underestimated these factors when he tried to adapt this stuff for his all-star cast. As a result, his movie is not only undaring and boring but fundamentally lifeless. The crap that Houellebecq wrote was heartfelt at least; the crap that Roehler shot was just the crap it was.The four stars I am willing to throw at this movie are all for the adorable Nina Hoss in the role of the brother's hippie mom. All for you, Nina, and don't you share them with the other kids!