• by Larry Dobrow , Featured Columnist, May 16, 2013

I was never much of a science student. While several of my schoolchums seemed to have a genuine curiosity about the world around them, my tastes ran more towards shenanigans and tomfoolery. That's not to say I didn't appreciate the many off-label applications of a pipette - specifically, as a vessel through which one might divert water onto the northern region of friends' dungarees - but, alas, I lacked the brains and patience to sift through Baldwin-dense textbooks. It was like, gravity? Stuff falls. Why worry about the precise mechanics?

All that has changed as my emotional and smartful intelligence has ascended into the range of the average 15-year-old. Like many other aspirants to the rank of non-dullard, I'm able to mask my lack of science knowledge by overcompensating online, choosing to deem anything that's science-y and cool as far more worthy (and shareable) than something that's cool alone. If there's a vomiting robot named Larry, I'm on it/him like… uh, particles on physics.

That's why I really, really, really wanted to like and comprehend, at least on some meat-and-potatoes level, "A Boy and His Atom." Billed as "the world's smallest stop-motion film," it's a rare viral-minded offering from IBM, a company assumed to be way, way above cheap click-trawling. In it, atoms are magnified 100 million times over, then manipulated to assume the form of an angular-haired boy who enjoys activities like jumping on subatomic trampolines and performing subatomic squat thrusts.

Judging by the how-we-done-did-it mini-documentary that accompanies the mini-film, an awful lot of brainpower went into its creation, just as it did - branding segue! - IBM's atomic memory and data storage doodads. And yet the whole endeavor delivers less of a cerebral jolt than the average "Mythbusters" segment about popcorn. It's cool and clever in the way a circa-1965 educational filmstrip is cool and clever - which is to say, not cool and clever.

Here's the problem: While the science that underlines the film is fascinating, the final product feels oddly antiseptic. Before the action, such as it is, kicks in, we're lectured that the film was "made by moving actual atoms, frame by frame." And then we see the end result of all that effort, and it's basically a bunch of monochromatic dots that appear to have escaped from the first-ever iteration of Pong. The makers add color in the form of a twee-bait synthesizer soundtrack, but it'd take an appearance by a subatomic Metallica to give the clip the punch it sorely needs.

The film includes only a single flourish that made me grin the grin of the newly enlightened. At its climax, the boy sends his atom-ball skyward. It passes through the clouds and dots the first 'i' in "Think IBM." That moment alone has the gauzy, almost narcotic feel that might have rendered the film artful and even a touch avant-garde.

Is it just me? It might be me. But hey, check out "A Boy and His Atom" and judge for yourself. If you can convince me that I've missed some grander message or branding imperative, I'll buy you a mega-atomic cheeseburger. Until you do, though, the official verdict from my sophistimacated neck of the woods is zzzzzzzzzzz-with-a-capital-Z. Next time, don't show me the end product - show me the darn scanning tunneling microscope in action, preferably optimized for use by the next Die Hard baddie.