Creation

By tackling Charles Darwin and the theory of evolution Creation has taken on not only, as the film grandly describes it,“the biggest single idea in the history of thought” but also science's most notorious procrastinator. Fearful of the revolutionary nature of his ideas Darwin put off publishing for more than a decade, pausing for eight years to study barnacles. The film focusses on the period in which Darwin, brought to a crisis of faith by the death of his favourite daughter and dogged by ill health, struggles to finally complete his master work, On the Origins of the Species. Trying to cram in the rudiments of evolutionary theory and the social and personal conflicts that it caused to bear down on Darwin, played by Paul Bettany as an increasingly deranged and tiresome figure, the film casts back and forth through his life, generating a great deal of heat and noise but little illumination.