Friday, September 25, 2009

Darwin on screen

For a limited time only, I can be heard on BBC Radio 3’s Nightwaves talking about the new Darwin biopic Creation. The film is worth watching, but don’t expect any revelations. New Scientist got a bit hot under the collar about the use of ‘supernatural’ imagery – Darwin’s dead daughter Annie, it says, returns as a ghost. Well, not really: there’s never any doubt that this is Darwin’s mind talking to itself. It’s fanciful, perhaps even sentimental in the end, but hardly an affront to reason. It’s a fairer complaint, though, that this ‘makes for a cartoon account of the writing of On the Origin of Species’, especially given that the book was published 8 years after Annie died.

2 comments:

JimmyGiro said...

Would I be sounding like an old misogynistic curmudgeon, to suggest it's about shoe-horning in girls and women into 'big' science?

I wait in anticipation to the next project: 'Relativity', the story of an average Austrian husband, who locked his genius wife in the cellar, and wouldn't let her out until she gave him three ideas of ground breaking physics, and a divorce.

Carlos said...

It would be great if this blog had an RSS feed...