The Blu-ray so impeccably nails down the visual detail of the film-cinematographer John Bailey’s sculpturing of light and shadow and the glistening azure of the staged sets-that one is held rapt by the screen image. Image/SoundĪs a follow-up to the groundbreaking The Thin Blue Line, the more modest A Brief History of Time seemed destined to become its own kind of dark matter, a forgotten gem waiting for re-release. Yet instead of finding nothing in dark matter, Hawking found himself. In his writing, Hawking’s evocative imagery of black holes and nothingness serve as elegant, metaphorical descriptions of his ailment and the diminished quality of his physical life. Morris’s reading of Hawking’s A Brief History of Time is that it is as much a popular science book as it is an inadvertent autobiography.

This isn’t merely a cute linkage between Hawking’s explanations of the fate of the universe and his own future compromised by ALS. These little touches are complementary to the film’s inner minimalism: its dark lighting, the ever-present clicks of Hawking’s computer interface, and the quiet murmurs of Glass’s score. In A Brief History of Time, such flashes of humor are scant but sufficient: When Hawking asks if the chicken or the egg came first in relation to what came before the universe, a moving image of a chicken head appears suspended in outer space. Consistently through his work, Morris demonstrates that he’s a humanitarian filmmaker, even if his films can feel cold, calculating, and at turns ironic. And The Thin Blue Line pinpoints the degree to which unscrupulous people can fabricate their own version of reality to obscure a real truth. In Gates of Heaven, he focused on his subjects’ intense grief for loved ones who weren’t human, but animals, pets that inevitably made their owners wonder about death itself.

Morris has always been more curious about the strange, nearly impossible ranges of human experience instead of nitty-gritty science. Certainly, some of the science is explained in Brief History by the physicist subjects, but in such a way as to arouse a non-specialist’s curiosity, present only to underscore the metaphorical qualities of cosmological concepts. Morris inherently understood that such dense theory is best delivered in a visual medium that allows for long, articulated written explanations, and that even his own cerebral filmmaking couldn’t accommodate ease of understanding. This isn’t a direct adaptation of the eponymous bestseller, with Stephen Hawking simplifying science in computerized voiceover alongside minimalist illustrations and cyclical Philip Glass score.

Errol Morris’s A Brief History of Time isn’t quite as literal a title as one might expect even from a filmmaker with an academic background in the philosophy of science.

A brief history of time review