S4: The Bob Lazar Story: UFO yes or UFO no?

In June 2019, Bob Lazar's first appearance on Joe Rogan's podcast became, within a few weeks, the most-watched episode in the format's history, accumulating over one hundred million views on YouTube. It was that interview that restored the physicist from Coral Gables to the global visibility he had pursued for thirty years. Everything that came after, including the documentary reviewed here, titled S4: The Bob Lazar Story, inevitably falls within the long wave of that conversation.

Luigi Vendittelli, a Montreal salesman with no prior experience behind the camera, stumbled upon Lazar's story during the 2020 lockdown and created a resin model of the so-called Sport Model, the 52.8-foot diameter flying saucer that Lazar claims to have studied in hangar S-4, a secret facility near Area 51 in the Nevada desert. From that model came the idea of a virtual reality reconstruction, then an immersive experience, and finally the documentary we are discussing.

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S4: Is the truth in here?

Four and a half years of work, during which the debutant director built a direct relationship with Lazar, submitting every detail of the reconstructions to him to get as close as possible to something no camera had ever filmed from the inside. A visual account of memory, aimed at all those who grew up with The X-Files and are passionate about true or alleged UFO-themed stories.

Let's cut to the chase for those who hoped that S4: The Bob Lazar Story might contain something new, shocking revelations about aliens that have been debated for decades between believers and skeptics, between conspiracy theories and kernels of truth. The hundred minutes of viewing bring no new evidence and contain no unprecedented testimonies or declassified documents capable of shifting the balance between credibility and science fiction.

Vendittelli himself, in an interview released on the eve of the film's release, had the honesty to admit it. What the film offers is something different, and in some ways more interesting in its peculiarity: a meticulous reconstruction of a story that until today existed only in a man's words, in his hand drawings, and in the collective imagination of millions of UAP (i.e., Unidentified Aerial Phenomena) enthusiasts around the world, but perhaps never so lucidly reached the general public in such an exhaustive way.

Hunting for answers

The film's main merit lies precisely in its ability to make tangible, through CGI reconstructions of remarkable quality for an independent production, the spaces Lazar has described for decades. The S-4 hangar with its roll-up doors facing Papoose Lake mountain, the child-sized cockpit of the Sport Model, the laboratory where a physicist attempted to understand a propulsion system powered by element 115, which at the time was not yet on the periodic table and would only be synthesized in the laboratory in 2003 under the name Moscovium. Details that Lazar had anticipated and that defenders of his credibility regularly cite as a point in favor of a story that the American government, however, continues to deny unequivocally.

The narration is entrusted to the directly involved party himself, an engineer who recounts, with the same calm with which he would explain the operation of a jet engine, having seen things that we humans could not imagine. Alongside him, in the interview segments, we find George Knapp - the Las Vegas journalist who first aired his story, under a pseudonym, on local television in May 1989 - and Gene Huff, the long-time friend who was a common witness to the flight of the flying saucer in the Nevada desert.

Not everything is perfect: the pacing is at times uneven and S4: The Bob Lazar Story always seems to promise something that then remains unexpressed, that plot twist that remains only a pipe dream as the credits roll. It re-examines theories already seen, with some new satellite footage confirming or denying such hypotheses and claims, in a staging that is too emphatic for what is actually shown.