Stephen Hawking: “There should be no boundaries to human endeavor. We are all different. However bad life may seem, there is always something you can do, and succeed at. While there’s life, there is hope.”
Plot: The relationship between the famous physicist Stephen Hawking and his wife.
Rating: 8/10
As this is a biopic about Stephen Hawking, I expected either a very scientific movie or something so sad I wanted to go gnaw off my own wrists. But the Theory of Everything managed to become one of the most beautiful and positive movies I have ever watched. Although it skimps a bit on the science side, it has a beautiful story of how loved Hawking truly is and how his destructive neuron disease couldn’t prevent him from becoming what he was meant to be.
The movie goes to great lengths to show you that Hawking’s wife had an impossible load on her shoulders and how she carried it for so long. Her determination to stick with him inspired me and is by all accounts quite true. Felicity Jones did an exceptional job as Jane Wilde. Her evolution from quiet determination to quiet desperation is sad to behold, because she loved her husband so much.
Eddie Redmayne is the darling of reviewers right now and I am not surprised. You can’t do the job he did and not get applauded for it. He is the star of this and so accurate in his portrayal that you could easily confuse him for a younger Hawking. I found his nerdy behavior from the very start so sweet and endearing, and how he went after Jane the second he saw her.
I also appreciated that The Theory of Everything was not a witch hunt against religion (I thought it could turn out that way). Rather than that Hawking’s beliefs were stated quite clearly but there was never any malicious element to it.
The only irritation I had was the length – it seems that if you want to be nominated for an Oscar a movie MUST be over two hours and that is just ridiculous. So much time isn’t needed to tell most stories and while this movie tells an exceptional one there was too much time allocated to the movie.
I took such hope from this. The sweetness radiates from Hawking and he is so determined to overcome his obstacles, and he does so without using his disease as an excuse and still fearlessly researches and questions science that few people dare to do. You might look at Hawking and think: Shame, he is so bound by his disease, but this movie shows you that he might be one of the only truly free people in the world.
Life of this city girl 