Starring: Professor Stephen Hawking, Jane Hawking, Nathan Chapple
A look into the life of Professor Stephen Hawking, who at the start of a promising career in physics was struck by Motor Neurone Disease and rendered permanently paralysed. Hawking has continued to soldier on to make groundbreaking studies into black holes and how we see the universe to becoming the most famous scientist on the planet.
There are few well-known people on living on Earth today who are seen as more extraordinary than Stephen Hawking. Now in his seventies when he was told he wouldn't see his mid-twenties, Hawking is already being compared to such great scientific minds as Sir Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein (he's even played a game of poker with them, well, actors playing them, in Star Trek: The Next Generation) so he's a great choice for a feature-length documentary but as a documentary, Hawking is fairly ordinary. The film does a good job picking bits-and-pieces from Hawking's life to provide a good overview of both his experiences as well as his day-to-day life and you warm to Hawking as a human being.
The prevailing problem is that the film feels much more televisual. Lacking the depth and dynamism that film documentaries unleash at their best. The film also slows to up its stop, seemingly uncertain about what part of Hawking's life to focus on to a close. As documentaries films go, Hawking is forgettable and throwaway but competent and still often manages to be interesting.
Next time, the most famous woman in the world begins a controversial and highly-publicised romance, Naomi Watts stars in Diana.
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