I strongly suspect that most of those who have reviewed this title on IMDB never watched the documentary through to the end. That's understandable - the filmmaker mostly just lets his subjects talk to the camera, and for the first 50 or so minutes of the film, the people who are speaking are essentially those who have drunk the free energy Kool-aid. It's after that portion of the film that the documentary actually gets quite interesting. In the last 30 or so minutes of the film, Newman (the inventor of a Rube Goldberg device that can power the world for peanuts) is revealed unequivocally as a scam artist and looney-tune - and a very hostile, violence-prone looney-tune at that. We see "demonstrations" of his goofy technology that reveal clearly that it is bogus - the demonstrations fail miserably. I think this is a worthwhile film as documentaries go, and I often find that good documentaries require the viewer to stick with them. There is often an opening which makes you think the film is one-sided, but all it takes is a little patience to get to the truth of the matter. The reviewer who wordily describes this as redemption for the inventor clearly didn't watch the whole film. Nor did those one-star reviewers who thought the film was propaganda for free energy "technology." The portrait of a slick homespun scam artist gradually descending into raging madness is actually quite riveting.
Review of Newman
