A Brief Review Of The Theory Of Everything

The Theory of Everything is a story of great things. Two great minds meet at Cambridge, a great university, where they experience and enjoy a great love.

Stephen Hawking, at the start, is a student. Like any other young man, he avoids doing his homework-to the point where he accidentally-on-purpose spills tea on the worksheet and has to write his work on the back of a train timetable!

Like any other young man, he attends a university party. There, like countless other young men have done over time, he meets and falls for a beautiful girl- Jane Wilde.

But just as their love, with all its dancing, laughter and striking normality, is getting started, along comes a great disability- Motor Neurone Disease.

This story of the world’s greatest mind and his great romance then takes, almost, a cruel twist as he is told he has two years to live.

The movie then becomes the story of how Stephen and Jane Hawking coped as he slowly lost all his physical abilities. When he loses his voice to a breathing tube, they find an old fashioned alphabet board. At this point the script comes up with one of many moments of humour in the middle of great sadness. They meet a speech therapist who thinks that Stephen Hawking is the most brilliant man she has ever met and says to Jane ‘You must worship the ground beneath his wheels.’

But, in between coping with great disability and the great sadness that it brought to both of them, they remain, for as long as possible, a “normal” family. They even have three children- to the surprise of their friends who naturally wonder if the disability affects ‘Everything?’

Overall, the movie focuses on the many positive things Stephen Hawking has done with his life. As we now know, he is a miracle case of MND, still alive after over 50 years of its constant company.

The only slightly negative thing that might be said about the movie is that a lot of the action takes place in sequences of music, meaning that you might miss something if you look away from the screen at some points.

It might feel like the movie doesn’t cover everything, but rather brief moments in flashes. But then, how could anyone fit over 50 years of greatness into two brief hours?

Perhaps a disabled actor could have been found to play Stephen Hawking in the later stages of the movie. However, overall, Eddie Redmayne does a brilliant job and Felicity Jones comes a very close second as Jane. They have made no secret in the media of the amount of research they have both put into their roles, and it is easy to see that their hard work will pay off.