First Hit: A truly amazing story about how sciences curiosity didn't take into account the effects on human beings.
This film starts out in a very lighthearted fun filled way. The audience, including myself, were out-loud laughing as Bobby Shafran heads to college and despite this being the first time he was on campus, everyone says hi to him and calls him “Eddy.”
As a shy young man this is both overwhelming and shocking but when his roommate figures out that Bobby is a different person from Eddy, they call Eddy on the phone.
When Bobby and Eddy meet and discover they were born as twins, were separated at birth, and adopted by separate families. This becomes a hot news story and gets published in all the newspapers. Then David Kellerman sees this story, meets up with Bobby and Eddy and they now realize that they were triplets, separated at birth, and given up for adoption.
The film goes on to show all the television programs they were on and all the articles that were written about the triplet boys, who at age 19, found each other together, again. At this point in the film I sensed that everyone, me included, thought this was going to be a completely happy film.
However, as one can expect, after we are fully entertained by how the young men discover their lost years together, their respective parents have questions about the adoption agency and if they knew that they had separated triplets and why they didn’t tell the respective parents.
As the film moves along the audience learns that David, Eddie and Bobby learn that they were part of an experiment by Dr. Peter B. Neubauer. He was attempting to determine the answer to an age-old question, Nature or Nurture? What determines human development. In the quest of this goal he designed an experiment to find unwed mothers that are expecting twins or more, that want to give the children up, and have them adopted through an adoption agency. Then he sent teams of individuals out to interview, test, and write up a synopsis of the development of each child.
At no time, did they publish the results of the study, nor did they tell the families, nor did they tell the children. The data, is still unpublished today and the angst in the families and the two remaining boys is prevalent.
Director Tim Wardle did a fantastic job of putting an engaging and interesting story together.
Overall: This real-life story was amazing to learn about and watch.