The Aeronauts

James’ Hun And
The Aeronauts

The Aeronauts
2019 UK/USA Directed by Tom Harper
UK cinema release print.

Warning: Very mild spoilers in terms
of the romantic content of the movie.

Directed by Tom Harper, The Aeronauts is one of those US co-productions with a distinctly British flavour, based on the real life antics of pioneering meteorologist James Glaisher in the 1860s. Starring the always brilliant Eddie Redmayne as Glaisher and the equally amazing Felicity Jones as his co-pilot on the venture, Amelia Wren, I was so entranced in this little ball of a wonderfully structured, cinematic gem that I was completely fooled in regard to the fact that, far from being a rock solid account of events as they took place in real life, there is a lot of fiction carefully grafted onto the source material to breathe life into the story. That is to say, the astonishing Mrs. Wren is, in fact, a complete fiction of a character... which makes me struggle a little with the restraint of one particular aspect of the story but I’ll come to that a little later. Suffice it to say, though, that Wren’s back story reads as completely convincing as any of the rest of the tale and it would be impossible for someone like me to tell what is what when it comes to seeing through the smoke and mirrors presented here. Not that I would want to do that, actually because... yeah... this is a truly entertaining little movie.

Okay, so  the film tells how Glaisher, with the help of his friend John Trew (played by Himesh Patel, who I thought was so good in Yesterday... reviewed here) approaches the recently widowed Amelia Wren, a couple of years after her husband died from falling from a hot air balloon flight the two were making (there’s more to that story but I won’t reveal it here), lifting her depression and hiring her as a co-pilot on a trip to get as far up as they can in the sky so that Glaisher can prove his theories about the atmosphere having layers and bring back enough research, or at least the start of research, to allow mankind to be able to predict the weather... something my various iphone apps still can’t do satisfactorily to this day. So next time you are looking at an app or show or weather report and want someone to blame for the blatantly false information based on meticulously researched guesswork, you can remember that you have James Glaisher to thank for it.

I love both lead actors in this movie and, of course, Redmayne and Jones already made a brilliant pair in their portrayals of Stephen Hawking and his wife in The Theory Of Everything (which I reviewed here). In this they are just as engaging and sharp as you would expect from them and it really helps to have two leads with such perfect chemistry because, frankly, the film is mostly a two hander set within their balloon... at least, that’s where the majority of the drama comes from.

In their quest to enlighten their audience, they are aided by a really ‘not bad’ script, in all honesty. The structure of the movie is such that the film starts with a bang just before the ballon is getting launched for its historic trip beyond the clouds and then, as the drama unfolds, one or other of the main characters will flash back to how they came to be in this position... in increments throughout the course of their current adventure... and just why they are exactly where they are (a bit like an old Marvel comic from the 1960s and 70s in that respect, I would say). The fact that they are both brilliant allows the narrative to soar through to the finish line with ease, using lots of comedy and personality clashes (to begin with) as Glaisher is the gruff, serious scientist (kind of) and Amelia is the wild, fun loving, entertainment seeker who demonstrates she can be more than just 'relied on' in a tight spot. This last demonstrated with some wonderfully fraught scenes of peril as the two characters race towards their final fate with death lurking in every gust of wind and with a truly brilliant final solution to slow the speed of their downward descent.

The film has a nice score, too, from Steven Price which, alas, has only been issued as the usual ‘quality challenged’, flat download and not put out on a proper CD... which means I won’t get the opportunity to hear it away from the main movie. However, it’s appropriate to the pacing and 'larger than life' shenanigans which go on in certain moments and beautifully compliments the visual information as it comes at you.

My one surprise (asides from a worrying scene with a dog early on in the film) comes in the form of the romantic element of the tale. It’s one of those movies where a burgeoning relationship is hinted at for the characters and it’s one which is never implicitly stated but certainly made a lot of in terms of the tone of the film. I was of the opinion then, as I watched it, that the two people obviously never ‘got it on’ in reality and so the moviemakers wanted to be true to life as much as possible, leaving the characters with a lot of things left unsaid. Which kinda made sense to me at the time. However, now that I know that Amelia Wren didn’t even exist in real life, I can’t think why the writers didn’t allow the romantic ‘sub plot’, as it were, to come to full fruition during the course of the film. I mean, everybody wants them to, don’t they?

Asides from this small puzzle and the fact that, in an age of CGI special effects, there is an underlying sense of sobriety in terms of taking the sheer spectacle of a hot air balloon credibly floating above 19th Century London at face value, I would have to say that The Aeronauts was one of the more enjoyable movies to get a cinema release this year and I’d gladly recommend this little slice of pseudo-history to anyone. The fiction of the thing may all be hot air but it certainly got this cinema goer to his final destination in as enjoyable a manner possible.

Rogue One

Rogue One’s Run

Rogue One  - A Star Wars Tale
2016 USA Directed by Gareth Edwards
UK cinema release print.

Warning: There’s a whole galaxy load of spoilers in this review so probably don’t read this until you’ve seen the movie.

First up, before I pull this movie apart a little, I’d like to ask you all to take this review with a pinch of salt. The reasons for this are as follows...

1). I was pretty ill when I made the journey into London to see this film. I traditionally always see my first viewing of a Star Wars movie in London’s West End (since the end of 1977 at the age of nine) and so I like to make sure I see each subsequent one in a similar venue (if not the same). If it hadn’t been that the cinema in question, the ODEON Leicester Square, had charged me an exorbitant £24 for the single ticket, I wouldn’t have braved it into the nation’s capital city to see it... I was that ill. This could have affected my viewing of it somewhat.

2). There have been a few films in my life where I didn’t get the brilliance of them until I watched them a second time. These have included The Mummy Returns, Avengers Age Of Ultron (reviewed here) and, very recently, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens. I’m guessing this was because there was just too much information for me to process the first time around and so, on subsequent viewings, I was able to appreciate the experience much better. So bear in mind that, although I love The Force Awakens now, I initially came out of my first screening totally depressed with it. So... bearing in mind I didn’t hate Rogue One nearly as much as I did The Force Awakens, I’m kinda hoping this troubling movie will grow on me on any subsequent viewings. That being said, I’m not planning on rushing back to see this one anytime soon and that’s all the wriggle room I’m going to give this movie.

Okay, so Rogue One starts off, as has been stated by many people, quite jarringly. There’s no opening title crawl after the familiar “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away...” (don’t worry Lucasfilm & Disney, I’ve grammatically corrected the number of dots on the end of the statement for you) which is a bad move, no opening rendition of the Luke’s Theme Star Wars fanfare (another dumb move) but, to be honest, the most jarring thing is not in the visuals but in the music here because, quite frankly, the first shot of the film itself is not inconsistent with the kind of shot you would normally get after a standard title crawl. The difference is purely Michael Giacchino’s opening sting which is deliberately heavy handed, for some reason. Think about the openings of the three Insidious movies (reviewed here, here and here) for a comparison. Giacchino does a similar thing here, albeit less atonal and more in keeping with the musical vocabulary of John Williams.

After this we get a story about how the Death Star plans were recovered to needlessly but, interestingly, make the plot device in the original Star Wars movie (later retitled Star Wars Episode IV - A New Hope) work. And, although it’s, for the most part, immersed in something which is similar to the known Star Wars universe, it doesn’t really feel much like a Star Wars movie, to be sure.

One of the many things which make it very different is the goody-goody moral attitude of the Rebel Alliance as portrayed in all the earlier movies. In this film you have one of the good guys shooting an informant in the back under the guise of calming him down and the same character keeping a hidden agenda from his comrades in arms for a good deal of the movie. So these are the dark edges of a war which, while absolutely necessary in real life, I would imagine, to being able to survive a war... have not been overtly on show in a Star Wars movie before, when it comes to the good guys doing bad things (I’m discounting Anakin Skywalker killing all those kiddies in Revenge of the Sith because he was already established as a villain by that point).

Now one of the bad things which threw me in this movie is that it tries so hard to be a separate channel, so to speak, from the regular Star Wars movies, that it seems somewhat contradictive when it does it while making so many references to the originals. Like The Force Awakens, it’s peppered with both sound effects, sound samples and lines of dialogue culled form the Star Wars stories so far. And to compound that further, it has a lot, really a lot, of characters from the original movies popping up in this movie. Like the Walrus Man guy and his surly friend in a moment that looked to me, pretty much, like the whole scene and dialogue was spliced into a new background in a way that almost makes the scene in A New Hope redundant if you happen to watch this one first.

Perhaps the most problematic thing is the return of Peter Cushing as Grand Moff Tarkin. Cushing has been dead for decades now but he’s been digitally resurrected using old footage, re-voicing and CGI twaddle. Unfortunately, he looks just like a bloody cartoon throughout the whole thing and I felt like I was watching a load of cut scenes from an old Playstation video game for a lot of the movie. I think it was a mistake to bring his character back into it this much in this movie, where he seems to have a much bigger role than he did in the original. Now, a friend of mine disagreed with me in the pub about this yesterday and he said the CGI work on Cushing was phenomenal. However, he then went on to say words to the effect that, “... obviously, you could tell it was computer generated but...” and there is the problem in a nutshell. So much CGI in many movies is totally invisible but, when the effects guys get ambitious, they usually ruin it. The fact that you can detect it, even if you didn’t know he was a digitally resurrected character, is absolutely rubbish and, as far as I’m concerned, not worth having in the first place. This monstrosity reminded me a lot of the CGI Yoda in the prequel trilogy, who also looked unrealistic and cartoon like. This is just awful and I think maybe Cushing’s character should have made a minimal appearance at best. When Princess Leia appears at the end of Rogue One, uttering one word, that was at least a bit more minimal and realistic, I thought. A much better use of the technology, as far as I’m concerned. Tarkin just pops you right out of the experience whenever he’s on which was not a good thing.

Another not so good thing is the prison transport truck which is carrying female lead Jyn Erso, played by Felicity Jones. As it trundles along on its wheels you just sit there all popped out of the movie again and go “What the f***? Wheels?” Even the primitive Gungans, over thirty years prior to when this movie is set, had hover technology just like “everything else in the Star Wars universe” asides from, obviously, the AT AT and AT ST Walkers. This is just wrong, wrong, wrong.

Okay, now the movie does something interesting in that we get a character in it who is a ‘Guardian of the Whills”. Now The Journal of the Whills is one of the first bits of Star Wars lore I can remember. It was in the original novelisation of the first movie and it referenced the tale as being a recorded set of facts from these fictional journals. However, although it’s been around in the public conscience since 1977, the Whills have never been overtly referenced in the actual movies themselves, that I can recall. So here we have Donnie Yen playing a Whill Guardian called Chirrut Îmwe except...

Well, there’s no easy way to say this... he’s basically playing Zatoichi.

Now regular readers of my blog will know of my love of the long running Blind Swordsman character Zatoichi and, to be fair, it’s easily the template for this character and the way Yen plays it almost directly references  Shintarô Katsu’s classic take on the character. Now, don’t get me wrong... I loved Yen’s performance here and I would be really surprised if the Japanese don’t offer him a new series of Zatoichi movies based on his performance but... it does seem like his character has just been grafted onto the movie with no rhyme or reason other than they wanted a cool, Zatoichi-like figure. Yes, I know the Star Wars movies are nothing if not a postmodernistic mish mash of various influences from 1930s Flash Gordon serials, Errol Flynn movies and Kurosawa chambera but still, this seems just a little bit too blatant in its ‘borrowing’... even for a Star Wars movie. He’s a cool character though so... whatever.

Darth Vader’s rampage aboard Princess Leia’s ship at the end of the movie makes no sense. Here he is all out using the force and his lightsabre to take out all the rebels, throwing them around with the power of the dark side like rag dolls... but in the following film, the original A New Hope, he resorts to using his hands to strangle a single rebel? Really? If he was still this powerful... doesn’t he come off as a little sedate in the original movies? Hmm... not going to say too much about that.

I’ve read a lot of bizarre criticisms that this is a movie with a strong female lead who dominates the plot. Felicity Jones character is the main character but I wouldn’t say she dominates the film and it really feels like a more ensemble piece, just like the original. So no worries on that front... all the actors and actresses (who aren’t digitally resurrected) do a good job here. I especially liked Alan Tudyk (Wash from Serenity and the Firefly TV show) as K-2SO. He’s pretty good and gets probably the best lines of throwaway dialogue in the entire movie.

It’s funny because people say it drags for the first half an hour and then gets going. I found it dragged the whole time and didn’t get going at all. Although I could see there was a lot of action on screen, it somehow felt really light on the action front to me and I think this was because the music wasn’t carrying me along in the action cues like it should have... which brings me to my main grouch about the movie... the musical score.

Now don’t get me wrong... I love Michael Giacchino and I love this score in some ways. I’m pretty sure when I put the CD on it will be a cool stand alone listen. In terms of what it does for this movie... well all I can say is that I wish Alexandre Desplat had stayed with the project.

Giacchino does some amazing stuff here in echoing John Williams orchestrational style from the first movie (possibly even more subtly than Williams did in his amazingly cool score for The Force Awakens) but what it triumphs in with the technical structure and texture of the sound it loses in its lack of rich melody. So it's like he covered the subtle details of how the scores work while simultaneously missing the broad strokes. Williams’ themes are barely referenced apart from a couple of appearances of The Imperial March (which is wrong because it should have really been pushing the original Death Star theme because The Imperial March doesn’t appear in A New Hope) and a couple of other moments, including Luke’s Theme in the end credits.

Now, I need some melodic, lietmotif hooks to keep me inside the Star Wars experience. This movie appeared not to have any. It’s fine if they want to lose the Williams themes in favour of strong, new thematic material (just like Williams did to a certain extent in The Force Awakens)... but you need to replace them with something consistently recognisable to keep the interest going. In Return Of The Jedi, by the time of the forest battle on Endor, you already know the Ewoks theme because Williams keeps referencing it... so the action music which uses it is something you can tap your toes to as you watch the happy carnage. Here... we have nothing strong that I could latch onto. Yeah... I know this composer only had four weeks to do it and I think he’s done a fantastic job here... I’d be surprised if this is his last Star Wars project. This one just didn’t serve its purpose, as I see it, in this movie. Yes, it’s very clever and uses the grammar of Williams’ scores but... I stayed on throughout the end titles, as I do with all the Star Wars movies, to try and get a handle on the themes and I still had a hard time hearing the melodies. Maybe it was because I was so ill but... maybe not.

And that’s as far as I’m going in this review, I think. I am really hoping that I’ll regret posting such a negative review when I get to see this film again... I’m hoping I get much more out of it on subsequent viewings. At the moment though... yeah, I can’t quite see this as a Star Wars movie... especially when there are some terrible ‘deus ex machina’ moments in it and what looks like a tagged on ending scene for two characters who should have been dead already. there’s some bad stuff in this movie and I was feeling the ‘StarWarsiness’ of any of it by the time the film finished, for sure. However... I’m willing to give it another try so I'll see how it goes next time... I guess.

Star Wars at NUTS4R2

 Episode 1: The Phantom Menace 

Episode 2: Attack Of The Clones

Episode 3: Revenge Of The Sith 

Solo

Rogue One 

Episode 4: A New Hope

Episode 5: The Empire Strikes Back

Episode 6: Return Of The Jedi 

Episode 7: The Force Awakens 

Episode 8:  The Last Jedi

Episode 9: The Rise Of Skywalker

Inferno (2016)

Inferno, Rest, Trains

Inferno (2016)
2016  USA/Japan/Turkey/Hungary
Directed by Ron Howard
UK cinema release print.

Not to be confused with the amazing Dario Argento movie of the same name, Inferno is the third of the big screen adaptations of Dan Brown’s popular Professor Robert Langdon series, this one being based on the fourth book... which is kinda strange but then the series started off with the second book, The Da Vinci Code and then made a sequel out of the first book, Angels And Demons (the movie of which I reviewed here). So why they’ve missed out The Lost Symbol I don’t know but I’m sure, if this series of movies continues to make as much money as the novels have done, they’ll get to it.

Like the first two movies, this one is once again directed by Ron Howard (who played Richie Cunningham in the TV show Happy Days back in the 1970s) and all I can say is, I still can’t figure out what his directorial signature is. Other than, for the most part, making some pretty entertaining and, usually, quite popular movies. My experience with the series thus far is... The Da Vinci Code was an okayish movie (and it had Audrey Tautou in it, so that helped) and Angels And Demons was an outstanding modern action thriller. This third one is incredibly entertaining too but, I think it also has some problems... just not quite enough to outweigh its sense of fun.

The movie, once again, stars the always watchable Tom Hanks as Professor Langdon (an actor I first saw in a TV movie called Mazes and Monsters and liked him in that so, you know, it’s good that he’s made a but of a name for himself now) and he is aided and abetted (character wise) by a very strong cast including Felicity Jones, who played Mrs. Stephen Hawking in The Theory of Everything (read my review here) and who is about to become very famous heading up the release, in September, of Star Wars: Rogue One. The film also stars Sidse Babett Knudsen (who I last saw in The Duke Of Burgundy (reviewed here), Ben Foster, Irrfan Khan, Omar Sy, Ana Ularu and... oh yeah, they’re all amazing. You will believe in these characters and the unusual things they say and do for sure... you will have no problem suspending your disbelief here, that’s for sure. So that’s one of the huge plusses that the movie has.

The film starts off in the midst of an ongoing story and we're catapulted right into the heart of things as we have a completely discombobulated Professor Langdon suffering from hellish hallucinations based on a famous illustration of Dante’s Inferno from The Divine Comedy. The pace is, beyond anything the second movie threw at the audience, quite blistering. However, for the movie as a whole that’s a bit of a double edged sword because, although you won’t get bored here and the action will whizz by at a rate which will leave you wanting to catch your breath maybe just a little more than the director and editors allow that to happen here... you will also be as discombobulated as Professor Langdon from the outset of the film. Although things make more sense as the film speeds on, you will find yourself just wishing it will all calm down at some point.

That is to say... it’s a movie made up of mostly short sharp shots. The modus operandi here seems to be why listen to a line of expositional dialogue in a master shot when you can split it up into three totally different angles of a character when they are delivering a line. I guess it makes the dialogue more interesting but it's usually also punctuated, very quickly, by another dose of action/suspense as Hanks and Jones are hunted by pretty much every authority on the planet... as Professor Langdon tries to stop a virus which promises to unleash death on over half the world very quickly (people who are familiar with the story as it’s represented in the book, which I’ve not read myself, should be aware that this movie has a quite different ending to the original novel). As a consequence, however, it’s all very choppy and there are some points, even in scenes where nothing much is happening, where you just wish everything would slow down and go back to a single master shot at some point.

I’m guessing one of the other reasons the people who made this have decided to subject this movie to a ferociously intimidating piece of editing (although it's never dull) is because there is a so called twist about two thirds into the movie and they're maybe trying to distract you from it but, honestly, if you haven’t worked out what that twist will be within five minutes of the film's opening sequence starting you’ve not been paying attention because, honestly, Howard pretty much telegraphs this not so revealing reveal quite a lot throughout the movie. I was kinda disappointed, actually, when it happened because... well, who wasn’t expecting that? Obviously, I won’t give that twist away here but it’s exactly what most people, I suspect, are thinking throughout the movie and saying to themselves... “C’mon Professor Langdon, when’s the penny going to drop?”.

So there’s that.

However, like I said above, although there are a lot of problems with the story... or at least with the way the story is presented in this medium here, there are enough plus points to kinda outweigh it and still give you a good time at the movies.  And one of those plus points, of course, is Hans Zimmer’s amazing score.

I kinda liked Zimmer’s score to the first movie in the series but wasn’t completely crazy about it. His second score, though, to Angels And Demons, was simply a fantastic modern work and certain tracks from that are never off my iPod or CD player for very long. This third score is better than the first and certainly holds it’s own with the second... although I need to hear it as a stand alone performance before I can decide whether I like it better than the second or not. The music obviously uses Zimmer’s already established Robert Langdon theme but, also, it seems to use a lot of references to the action themes from Angels And Demons in some of its slower passages too... especially through the first third of the movie, which surprised me because that means I’ve now got absolutely no idea how the leitmotif works with this set of films. Why the heck was that in here? I haven’t got a clue but I do know a good soundtrack when I hear it and this one is pretty cool. As to be expected from the pacing on the movie, there’s a lot of action music and percussion so it should be quite a ‘rocking’ listen when I finally get the CD to this one. I’ve come to respect Zimmer a lot over the last decade or so, after initially dismissing him at the early stages of his career. He also knows how to rock a concert venue as you can read in my review of his London concert from earlier in the year here. 

All in all, although Inferno is quite predictable, a bit choppy and aggressively edited (not to mention quite noisy for a lot of the time), it’s also got some beautiful visuals (when you get time to focus on them), some great acting, an amazing score and, frankly, there are a lot worse big budget type popcorn movies you could be spending your cinema cash on at the moment. I’m not hearing a great critical reaction to it at the moment but I’m hoping that it will do enough at the box office so that Ron Howard and Tom Hanks will reunite for a fourth one (and preferably with Hans Zimmer in tow). Hopefully they’ll sink their teeth into The Lost Symbol next.

The Theory of Everything

Look Who’s Hawking

The Theory of Everything
2014  UK
Directed by James Marsh 
UK cinema release print.

Almost every year these days, on my birthday, I take my parents out to see a movie at our local cinema. It’s rare they go to the cinema and probably only go with me between 2 and 4 times a year. Usually, to be honest, it’s to a film that I know one of them would like, rather than something I would be happiest seeing myself and, this year, I decided on the new biopic of Stephen Hawking, The Theory Of Everything, because I knew my father would probably really like this one (and I can always buy my mum Paddington on Blu Ray for Mother’s Day, after all).

Now, I’m really not a religious person and I don’t understand the willingness of anybody to believe or support any of the organised religions of the world... which seem to be crafted by the hand of man as a tool for control at the best of times. However, just because I have that view, it doesn’t mean I rule out the existence of God, or a God-like being or, possibly, a God-like energy in the universe. I like to keep an open mind about such things. Many people seem to think that Hawking’s scientific theories preclude God or a God-like entity in the mix and that seems to be the same tack that this film takes. One thing I will say on this subject, however, is this... Hawking’s has got motor neuron disease. When it was first properly diagnosed in the early to mid-sixties (going by the film here) he was given just two years to live. It’s now over fifty years since then and he is still with us. If ever someone wanted to try and show some evidence that there is a deity watching out for certain people on Earth or the possibility of a grand scheme of things then the survival of Stephen Hawking, the greatest scientific mind of our generation, would definitely be considered by most people... well... a bit of a miracle.

The film is based on the memoirs of Hawking as told by his once and longtime wife, Jane Hawking, brilliantly portrayed by Felicity Jones. Hawking himself is a tour-de-force of a performance by Eddie Redmayne, who I first saw when he was playing Colin Clark in My Week With Marilyn (reviewed here). He was pretty good in the former film but he really does turn in a gobsmacking performance here. If he was just portraying Hawking in one specific phase of his battle with motor neuron disease then it would be no less brilliant but certainly understandable. However, with the timing of the film spanning from around 1962 to the present day, with Hawking seen in various stages of the disease... when you take into account that these thing are not shot in chronological order... well, this performance must get some kind of recognition when it comes to award season, I reckon.

Felicity Jones has an easier time of it, I would guess, but her performance here is no less subtle...

I once had a really good friend. I’ve somehow managed to fall out with her now but, in fact, the lady I’m thinking of was almost certainly the best friend I’ll ever have and I can’t imagine that ever not being true, regardless of the fact that I don’t see her any more. When we first started talking, years ago, in a pub rendezvous, I became aware that she was looking after someone very sick and, my reaction to that news was honest and it’s probably something that someone in the position of caring for someone above and beyond the call of duty is used to, coming from that kind of situation... I immediately started trying to think of ways in which the person she was caring for could be helped and try to understand what the sick person was going through. However, it was made clear to me, as that particular conversation wore on, that the person who is actually caring for someone and having to do a lot more than a standard workload in their relationship (this on top of a full time job, no less) is a person who also needs the understanding and support of those around her/him. That role gets taken for granted a lot but it is exhausting and it’s something that the one being cared for is too wrapped up in illness to appreciate that often... and that can be a wearing, grueling, big deal of an issue sometimes. And it’s something I tend to consider more (I hope) when I meet people in a similar situation (as I have on occasion).

All of this kind of responsibility was brilliantly performed by Felicity Jones’ performance as Jane and, again, like Eddie Redmayne’s performance, it’s a slow burn where the actress has had to cope with playing the gradual build up from doing all the extra work caring for her on-screen husband to not coping with all that life is flinging at her. And again, it’s something she’s had to film out of sequence but with a degree of subtlety so that, when it’s all put together in linear fashion... and it’s a, mostly, surprisingly linear film, to be fair... then we see the gradual build up as all the elements line up against her and wear her down over time.

So... cracking performances by both the male and female leads, in this one.

It has to be said, though, that the film relies almost purely on these performances to the exclusion of much else. Sure, there are some nicely elegant set pieces and some lovely shot designs but there seems to be a lack of interest in experimentation in the way the movie is put together so that, even when a specific moment comes up at a Q & A scene near the end of the movie and the on-screen Hawking appears to do something he would never be able to do in real life, it never really takes you by surprise and I thought that where the director did try and use the language of cinema a little by running the film backwards as a metaphor, perhaps, for Hawking’s theories, it wasn’t really all that successful or as interesting as it might have been... at least not to this audience member.

However, one thing the film certainly is, is it’s a more than competent, British-made biopic with a very well written script and very strong performances so, frankly, anything else would have just been extra icing on the cake anyway. Similarly, Jóhann Jóhannsson’s score was appropriate and certainly easy on the ear but, I couldn’t help but wondering what it might have been if they had maybe employed the services of a composer like Alexandre Desplat, to be honest, but again... it was still pretty good and too much icing can be fattening at the best of times.

At the end of the day, The Theory Of Everything is a really neatly put together and powerful dramatisation of the majority of the life of one of the greatest scientific thinkers in history. It’s something that British cinema and television seem to do extraordinarily well and this entertaining and moving film is certainly no exception. Definitely worth a look if you don’t go in expecting too much from it structurally or are anticipating semiotic acrobatics. Certainly something which will hook you in from the start, though, and the performances are well worth the watch. Don’t waste any time contemplating not seeing this one... you never know what time is going to do to you next.