on Hulu Plus
I just watched this for free on Hulu plus (and see that the DVD is available on Netflix). I have been fascinated with this saga for years and even made a point of personally visiting the town a year or so ago. The movie does a good job of pulling together a lot of information on Centralia and I found the interviews quite fascinating. If it did indeed take 3 years to make this movie (as stated elsewhere on this site) it would have been nice to hear from a few more people than the few interviewed and much better details about the fire and geology of the site.
The central focus of the video is John Lokitis, the guy who has lived there since he was a kid, refuses to leave, and has clearly lost any hold he ever had on reality. Time and again the film comes back to him, standing outside with plumes of smoke billowing from the landscape behind him, talking about how the town is safe and everyone should come back to make it just like it was. He and other ex-residents complain about how the government has treated a problem that the town itself created. There are many old shots and film clips of what the town was like in the '50s and '60s, and these people blame the state and fed government for ruining their town. Two important points are never quite brought out or stressed enough:
1. Yes, the gov may have dropped the ball on solving a problem that the town itself created and MAYBE might have been able to fix if approached the correct way shortly after the fire started, but no one knows that for sure. This was a unique circumstance, the townsfolk should have known better and suddenly expected the state or fed to suddenly bail them out. The state/fed basically spent millions upon millions of taxpayer dollars on that town because of a problem they themselves created, not a natural disaster. Yet, very few of them seem grateful.
2. The town was doomed to begin with, even without the fire. The film keeps emphasizing how great the town was "back then" and implies that it is the government's fault it is no longer like that. But I got news for those folks: NO TOWN is like what it was back then. That region of the country is riddled with towns that are nothing but shells of their former glory after the bust of the coal and steel industries, and the townsfolk of Centralia could almost consider themselves lucky that most of them got a nice buyout of their property with taxpayer dollars where residents of other similar towns all around them were emptying out of residents that were losing their jobs, idyllic lives and homes with no assistance of that sort. Yes, these issues are hinted at in the film, but squeezed between many shots of Lokitis going on and on about how great the town was and how the governments screwed them over.
In other words, as a scientist, I would have preferred to see a more logical treatment of the circumstance rather than this touchy-feeling approach that seems to try to skew one's perspective with emotion.