text: How to take Charles Darwin's fantastic intellectual journey and turn it into a chick flick. His pivotal and seminal ideas and their radical influence on Western thought and capitalist society are untouched except for two brief scenes, in one of which it is claimed he is "killing God"; pure demagoguery to make the movie emotional. And the rest of the movie buckles to that purpose: it consists entirely of melodramatic and long family scenes with overloud music at which one is beholden to cry. Anyone who actually read "Origin Of Species" would be vividly aware that there was no breach with God in any of Darwin's work; to the contrary, there was an increased awe and respect, and a revolutionary new way of looking at things. A good movie about Darwin could be educational, thoughtful, and deeply inspiring, even in a religious sense - but that would contradict the soap-opera intentions of this flick. This is a flick that is designed to make people wail in contrived sympathy and then feel transformed although unable to understand why; it makes fast use of Darwin's great name only as marketing clout, as one would drop a famous name at a party to create an impression. Sad that the sets and costumes are so good: production values, except for the writing, were obviously high. See it if you want to weep, for the loss of intelligence in American literature.