This is NOT a book of science

Rating: 9/10 (24 May 2015)

This is a very beautiful film that shows love, dedication and commitment. To fall in love so fast and be faithful so long – till death them parts – is a fairy tale, an untellable story and the film tries to tell it.
Doctors when they are confronted to a disease they do not know or understand are ready to tell you will die within two years. This film, this Stephen Hawking is the most brilliant proof that doctors' predictions, and alas sometimes their prescriptions, are useless and nonsensical. They can just not admit they do not know.
Stephen Hawking is also the proof that your body can become completely obsolete, nonreactive, dilapidated and yet your mind may keep all its power, and the first power man's mind has is to be able to choose between ending the suffering of the body before intended by nature or using his mind to its full potential till the end of time, till the natural end of his time.
As for the famous theory of the black holes, of the limitless universe in space and time, and of the big bang that starts from something that is not considered as being the beginning, which is obvious since it existed before the big bang otherwise there would not have been a big bang, I will not here discuss the few details I could discuss. For example that time is a human invention and that nature only contains duration. This is so true that we still have not been able to configure some time counting machine that would come to the perfect dimension of a second, minute, hour, day, month, year that would enable us to skip the leap years and other silly little corrections like that.
The fake debate about God or no God is just what it is a fake debate. If the universe is limitless it has no beginning point, hence it has no creator. If there is a creator somewhere we can always wonder the way Buddha used to wonder: but who in the cosmos created that God, and that opens a door that leads to so many other doors that there is no logic along that line. The myth that you can find the perfect mathematical equation that will demonstrate the big bang theory is what it is a myth that cannot anyway evade the fact that if the big bang and the universe can be described by mathematical formulas, then it is obvious this universe is logical, is rational. Can anything rational exist all by itself outside the brain of a sentient and rational being? And that cannot be man since man is so young in this universe. We can always say it is the result of the architecture of the universe and that architecture cannot stand one minute if it does not respect some balancing elements, etc.
And you see the result. My grandmother is turning over and over in her tomb and she is losing her last teeth because she is chattering with fear, she is shattered by fear.
I can very precisely explain the origin and the phylogeny of human language that started somewhere around 250,000 years ago because it is the product of a very clearly definable situation, but to look for an origin of the universe which implies the universe is not limitless, or to accept the idea that the universe is limitless which implies always is not quantifiable and forever really means forever, does not answer the question about where all that comes from.
Luckily the film avoided that level of theory and concentrated on the human side of this heroic suffering and brilliant inventiveness, though, after one rebuffing session with scientists that sees several men of science leaving the room in furor and anger before some Soviet scientist turned the wind around, it does not even hint at the fact there might be some serious objection against that theory because it is nothing but a theory, hence a model constructed by the mind of a man, the minds of a few men. Hence something that has to be taken as what it is: only a human representation of what man understands about the universe at one moment in time, one moment in man's history, and man's history is the basis of man's time.
Of course no one expects a film to give us the final truth about what we do not even know how to imagine.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU