- Also Known As:
- Year:
- 2009
- Country:
- Predominant Genre:
- Historical
- Director:
- Outstanding Performances:
- Premiss:
- English naturalist Charles Darwin struggles to find a balance between his revolutionary theories on evolution and the relationship with religious wife, whose faith contradicts his work.
- Themes:
- Alienation | Atheism | Christianity | Compassion | Destiny | Emotional repression | Evolution | Loyalty | Nature | Personal change | Political Correctness | Religion | Science |
Self-expression | White culture - Similar (in Plot, Theme or Style) to:
- Review Format:
- DVD
Hardly surprising that a self-contradictory hypothesis like Evolution (Random Mutation & Natural Selection contradict each other since they do not resolve the issue of whether mutations are based on luck or survival fitness) should produce such a confused movie.
Claims that Nature is brutish and purposeless and that survival at all costs is all that matters to species is self-evident nonsense since few species predate and devour each other. Such a claim is more a matter of White pseudo-intellectuals projecting and displacing their own violence onto the rest of the world: The so-called ‘Universal struggle for Life’. One wonders if Darwin’s ideas about Natural Selection are nothing more than an intuitive response to selective breeding of livestock practised by humans rather than the voyage of the Beagle - despite the fact that such breeding does not lead to an evolutionary improvement in the species so bred, but to inbreeding. (Darwin’s marriage to his own first cousin being a prime example.)
Because Christians have always been uncivilised in their attempts to force others to their will - because they lack the very civility they wish to inculcate in others - it follows that Darwin is seized upon by atheists as a contrary explanation for the existence of life on Earth in a desperate attempt to refute god. The false conflict between Science and Religion is merely the attempt to aggrandize both - but has failed since both are still triumph in the modern world. It is possible to claim that god created Evolution such that Darwin’s theories do not kill god - as claimed here.
There is no suggestion here that since the publication of The Origin of Species in 1859, the evidence for the existence of a process called Evolution should be so scant as to call its very existence into question, despite its unquestioned acceptance by most of Western culture; making this no more than propaganda for a barely credible pseudo-scientific belief. Strip away all the White political hocus-pocus and you have a hypothesis that is no more than a self-fulfilling prophecy: The fit survive because they are the fittest to survive. A statement of the obvious that does not qualify as the “biggest single idea in the history of thought” - especially when some mutations are not beneficial to survival, such as humans with six fingers, but which does not harm the possessors.
Paul BETTANY is excellent as always and the relationship between himself and his screen daughter (Martha WEST) is well-handled; revealing - better than his relationship with his wife - the life of the mind that he pursued. His daughter turns out to be far more perspicacious than he about the human soul as she is written to be his conscience; constantly commenting on the action of the drama as often as she is an integral part of it. She is, in fact, what this movie is all about.
Emotionally, this film is an impressive achievement; scientifically, it is little more than quackery.
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