Stream It Or Skip It: ‘A Trip to Infinity’ on Netflix, a Mind-Boggling Documentary About Everything We Don’t Know About Everything

Netflix documentary A Trip to Infinity is gonna BLOW your MIND, dude. Directors Jonathan Halperin and Drew Takahashi solicit experts to help them tackle the most maximal topic in the history of everything from a few different angles – and when you think about it for a sec, the only possible conclusion one can arrive at is a sublime and confounding realization that, on a cosmic scale, humans are naught but grand ignoramuses. Good luck finding meaning and purpose for your existence after watching this one!

A TRIP TO INFINITY: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: It “doesn’t behave like we’re used to.” It’s “a monster that needs to be tamed.” It “creates and destroys mathematicians.” It’s infinity! You know, the thing that goes on and on and on and never ends, like your father-in-law’s political tirades or The Snyder Cut rimshot! Here we have theoretical physicists, mathematicians, philosophers, theoretical cosmologists and the like talking about infinity – what it is, how it works, where we can find it (I bet Amazon has the best price and quickest free delivery), etc., and their concepts and explanations are illustrated by a variety of nifty animations in a variety of visual styles ranging from literal to metaphorical. And I can’t help but wonder, what does a theoretical cosmologist think about when their mind wanders? The Great British Baking Show, probably.

The doc is divided into linear chapters identified by recognizable numbers such as 1, 6, 3 and the like. I feel like it should have been more spherical in structure to fit the subject matter, but it still works pretty well. We learn that infinity can equal 0, and it can also make 1 equal 0. We learn about circles and how they keep going and going and going. We learn about how gigantic infinity is, and how tiny it is. There’s some stuff about black holes and wormholes. There’s this great bit about how an apple in a box will decay into mush and then dust and then microscopic particles and then it kind of becomes one with the universe and, if you give it enough time, significantly longer than you’ll wait for a table at IHOP on a Sunday morning, it’ll become an apple again. And when it all comes down to brass tacks, or something much much smaller than brass tacks, like quarks or something, we really don’t know shit about infinity. It pretty much exists to remind us of the uncertainty of everything. Pro tip: hit the dispensary before pressing play on this mofo.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: The Black Hole, Interstellar, the last 30 minutes of 2001: A Space Odyssey, Avengers: Infinity War, Infinite starring Mark Wahlberg as a man who “discovers that his hallucinations are actually visions from past lives,” and both the Carl Sagan and Neil deGrasse Tyson versions of the Cosmos TV show.

Performance Worth Watching: Mathematician Steven Strogatz gives off some serious lovable-high-school-physics-teacher vibes: He speaks in an upbeat tone that infects you with his sense of awe and wonder for the natural world.

Memorable Dialogue: The ultimate brain-pretzeling line: “In fact, there’s an infinite number of ways to make the universe finite. And there’s really only a couple ways to make it infinite.”

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: A Trip to Infinity is slickly crafted and executed. It presents complex ideas in a terrifically entertaining manner, and doesn’t dumb anything down too much. The talking heads are knowledgeable and engaging, their presence functioning as the stitching holding together a patchwork of creatively conceptualized animations. Movies about heady, weighty subjects aren’t usually so much fun.

Thematically, the core message here addresses the futility of wrestling with paradoxes. You’re better off embracing the idea that all of the human race’s advanced logic and calculations will likely never explain or comprehend the greater existential realities of the universe. And that’s why some of the scientists and thinkers in this film look so bemused as they attempt to elucidate, since it’s ultimately a futile task. One says humans are like cats: They, and we, are only capable of understanding reality within the limitations of their intelligence. It’s Aristotle’s old idea – the more you know, the more you realize how much you don’t know. This isn’t to say we’re better off being cats, because they don’t have the capacity to realize that we’re just specks on a speck in an incomprehensibly vast universe; we’re smart enough to know we don’t know, and once you accept that, it makes infinity feel a little bit lighter.

Our Call: A Trip to Infinity is the greatest, most significant movie ever made, and also the most inconsequential. For that reason, it’s noteworthy. STREAM IT.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com.