Darwin's Darkest Hour (2009)

It was OK. I don't see why everyone loves it so much. It wasn't very smart or deep or well-directed.

Good films always raise compelling questions, whether the format is fiction or documentary fact.

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

Let me be very fair here, this is not the best movie in my opinion. But, this movie is fun, it has purpose and is very enjoyable to watch.

As movie is very weak dramatization,centered around his family,in several flashbacks about your travell,meetings and some facts less interesting,in fact this picture is portrait of home,in confined days when Darwin was pretty worry about your book could be after published,the storm probable will be destroy all family and unfortunatelly the picture ends exactly when the book come out,Henry Ian Cusick is miscasting he don't looks like with character at all.Resume:First watch: 2018 / How many: 1 / Source: DVD / Rating: 6.5

This film provides a glimpse into the life and times of Charles Darwin just before publishing Origin of the Species. His wife's intelligent, principled role, his children's' engagement in science and learning as well as tragic illness, the struggle with ethical questions related to attribution ("intellectual property rights" within the scientific world). It provides the basic reasoning & observations behind the theory and the fascinating context - especially recent discoveries about geological forces and time scale. A revolution in our understanding of the world all taking place in one short century. Pretty exciting! Filmed in beautiful Nova Scotia where I live (a pleasant surprise) - including local actors & sites. (Ironically the film tax credit that brought the filming here was drastically changed April 9 2015, 3 days before we watched the film, leaving the future of film-making in NS in doubt).

This is a pretty movie. Darwin's six charming children are perfectly clean, starched and combed, who might have Mary Poppins or Maria von Trapp as nanny. His wife is a vision of loveliness in gigantic hoop skirts. There is no dust or anything broken in his house. His huge gardens are perfectly tended by invisible gardeners. His papers are perfectly arranged so that even something from a decade past is right on top. We never find out how this magnificent gleaming estate is financed.I have problems with the movie because it so conflicts with everything I heard about Darwin. His wife was an ardent Christian, who strenuously opposed him publishing. Yet in the movie she is his champion and cheerleader urging him to publish.Darwin was terrified of how Christians would react to his work. He made himself ill with fear. Yet in the movie, he is always in perfect health.When his daughter died, that ended Darwin's belief in a benign god. This was a key event in his life. It was handled very indirectly in a single sentence in the movie. I felt the director was Christian and was dishonestly doing all he could to make Darwin look like a solid Christian. Darwin was well aware what he was doing would rock the church to its foundations. Darwin's father and grandfather were atheist, so his lack of faith should be expected.The movie used a clumsy device. After years of marriage, Darwin finally decided to tell his wife what he had been doing in his lab all those years. Why the silence? Why the breaking of the silence? Not explained. This allowed the camera to do flashbacks. The exposition went on and on. Darwin used quite archaic, guarded language which was not very helpful to the modern viewer. I think some poetic licence could have done this exposition work with specific examples and visuals of animals and plants, rather than people walking about a garden talking in abstractions.The movie ends with the publication of Origin Of Species. The truly interesting part comes later.Unfortunately, you don't learn much about evolution. The main subject is who gets credit for ideas.

This is a well crafted story about the dilemma faced by Charles Darwin when he receives a letter from Russell Wallace that almost spells out the theory of Evolution from Natural Selection. Darwin has been working on this theory for some 20 years and now he holds a letter that could usurp his primacy should he forward it on. The show then follows his conversations with his wife as he discusses what he should do, and the events that shaped his formation of the theory. This is also a drama that touches on the current health troubles in his family and the effect the death a few years before of his beloved daughter Annie had on him. This is an excellent production, the performances are solid, and the art direction,sets, and costumes are wonderful. The only complaint was the contrivance of having Darwin spell everything out to his wife (who would have know 90% of it already) for our benefit. But this is also a quiet drama of his family life so cutting between that and him talking to... a reporter(?)would have been jarring. They could have done the whole thing in flashbacks from a time after publication, but what they did here ultimately does work, as we watch an honorable man do the right thing.