Maybe reading Mrs. Hawking's book is a better investment than watching this film

Rating: 2/10 (31 May 2015)

This film took an incredible amount of dedication to get through; I even had to break it up between two days. Eddie Redmayne's portrayal did such a good job of showing the 'silverspooned' flippancy, and associated arrogance of anyone lucky enough to get into Cambridge, that half way through you're almost glad that Hawking's ego was tempered by fate and ALS. Guy gets into boys' club, Guy gets into aristocracy, Guy gets pretty girl, and it's all about the Guy, with very little science thrown in.
Certainly the script was gleamed from the first Mrs. Hawking's work, but after some thought at the film's end, you wonder if Hawking's ALS was the single most deciding factor that provided the 'thinking man' time to think himself to greatness. After all, great men come from great sacrifice, and Mr. Hawking's great sacrifice was that he no longer could experience life the way the rest of humanity experiences it. The film certainly had an air of 'Cambridge guy does film about another Cambridge guy' love only a fellow Cambridge guy and the old boys' club would appreciate., The rest of the 99.9% of us are left with less than a real look into the source as to why Hawking was famous (as was the compelling root of similar films like Russell Crowe's "A Beautiful Mind"). Even after desperately waiting for Professor Lupin (David Thewlis) to share some much needed humility we're even grasping for deeper development of Dennis Sciama, PhD. But after trudging through the fiction that was Alan Touring's re-telling, it's not hard to believe that Cumberbatch and Redmayne are friends, as they are more apt to tell the story as they see it, as opposed to the way the story was as history experienced it.
To quote Kirk Lazarus from "Tropic Thunder": 'Everybody knows you never go full retard.' Eddie Redmayne certainly took that advice to heart, supposedly almost to the point of experiencing his own spinal damage in the making of this dull film. You'd certainly get a better return, and a heck of a lot more "Stephen Hawking" watching television's "Big Bang Theory" than you could from Redmayne's the theory of making a very boorish film. For every intellectual movie-goer out there who already knows Hawking's disabilities, you'll get nothing more than what you already knew from Redmayne's portrayal, and for those searching to know Hawking more, well then you just may not like Hawking after Eddie Redmayne's rendition of him.