Creation is a movie that gives partly biographical and partly fictional description of Charles Darwin and his family during the making of the world famous and (at the time) revolutionary book ”origin of species.” Creation was filmed in 2009 and it was directed by John Amiel and starred by Paul Bettany.
Story basically revolves around the father-daughter relationship of Charles Darwin and his oldest daughter Annie (Martha West) who dies but keeps haunting the mind of Charles who is trying to finish his work with ”origin of species.”
Movie starts when Darwin is still a young father telling stories of his expedition and studies to her beloved daughter Annie. Later it gets clear that Annie is, in fact, dead and she is only to be seen in dreams and hallucinations of her father. Between flashbacks you can see a clearly ill man who is trying to finish his book that, according to his colleague, kills god. Darwins battle with his illness and hallucinations separate him from his religious wife (Jennifer Connelly) and finally, after Darwin has visited her daughters deathbed, drives them to a conflict that at the end helps them to solve their problems.
I found this movie by accident from a normal grocery store when I was doing my daily shopping. It was really cheap, only one euro. I have also always been interested in biology and science so I had to buy it immediately when I saw it. So now I am going to give you a brief insight to what the movie was like and what kind of feelings it evoked.
Movie was interesting because it gave a good impression to the lives of people in the 19th century when religion and church were the most reliable authorities and when there was no science that could have explained a lot of the surrounding world. It even felt a bit surreal to a modern day human how everything worked and how unaware people were at the time.
Since it was a story about Darwin it was easy to identify with him, a man who was determined to work to find the truth but had to go thru a battle between his hunger for achieving his goals and his love for his family. All the other characters were somehow left in the dark altough for example Annie and Emma had a fair share of screentime in the film.
The film was sometimes pretty hard to follow, even when you knew that Annie was dead it sometimes was really hard to see the difference between flashbacks and hallucinations, it also, from time to time, had a really dark atmosphere that got a bit lighter at the end of the movie when Darwin made a truce with his wife.
All in all the film was good, not great, but good. It did what a good movie should: evoked feelings and thoughts and was never boring. It, for example, made you think about how it would feel to lose someone important to you and to get stuck in the past. It also showed how a man can get stuck to some process being unable to enjoy life. So it reminded me to enjoy life and not to stress about the expectations that are layed upon you. I would recommend this movie for everybody even though science or creationism wouldn’t interest so much because it was also a deep drama and had a lot of lovestory ingredients.