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After failing to find a U.S. distributor until late 2009, the Charles Darwin biopic Creation finally lands stateside Jan. 22. Perhaps the movie poster above – of the evolutionary biologist and a monkey in a pose that apes, if you will, Michelangelo's legendary Sistine Chapel painting The Creation of Adam – proved to be a stumbling block.
The Creation promo poster was provided exclusively to Wired.com for this first look. Director Jon Amiel's movie, which stars Paul Bettany as the revolutionary scientist and Jennifer Connelly (of course!) as Darwin's faithful wife, is sure to rile up anyone who still thinks evolution isn't Earth's proper intelligent design.
"I think [Darwin] was an extraordinarily brave human being," Bettany said in a press release. "I like the idea of a person who is a social conservative having this revolutionary idea, and once he sees it he cannot stop seeing it, and he feels that everywhere he looks there is proof."
The Darwin biopic was originally deemed too controversial for backward America, a land whose last president thought that creationism and evolution stood on equal ground.
Since this is a big-ticket film, Darwin's historical troubles are merged with his more personal ones, including the early deaths of his mother and three of his children, as well as his struggle with the loss of his faith. What emerges is a nuanced portrait of a man beset by losses of all kinds, even as he shines the way forward for one of the science's most important discoveries.
"What interested me was what he suffered along the way to finally achieve an aura of unassailable gravitas," screenwriter John Collee (Master and Commander) said in a press release. "He was deeply in love with a woman who disagreed profoundly with his theory. He cherished his children and saw three of them die. He suffered horribly from a lifelong illness that may or may not have been psychosomatic."
Whether this emotional back story – based on the book Annie's Box by Randal Keynes, the great-great-grandson of Darwin and nephew to famed economist John Maynard Keynes – will resonate with viewers on either side of the Darwin divide remains to be seen.
In an age of next-gen blockbusters like the 3-D spectacle Avatar, Creation isn't likely to burn up the box office. But given that a titanic scientist like Darwin has yet to receive a full cinematic treatment, one can't help but pull for the legendary author of On the Origin of Species.
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