The rule for success in science movies: make it personal

Instead, The Theory of Everything focuses on the life of Hawking, 72, now almost totally paralyzed from motor neuron disease, and the collapse of his marriage to his first wife, Jane Wilde. It's an approach that has led some science-minded folks to knock the film in advance. But movies have always preferred to look at people over the knocking together of equations, says the film's Oscar-winning director, James Marsh, who already is being mentioned as a possible contender in Hollywood's upcoming award season, the National Geographic reports. "What we do is travel through Jane's eyes to try and translate the science," Marsh says. "We made the movie for the audience, not for theoretical physicists." From 1943's celebratory biopic Madame Curie to 2001's A Beautiful Mind-the recounting of the troubled life of mathematician John Nash that in some ways is the clearest precursor to The Theory of Everything-the most popular science flicks have emphasized the personal over the professorial. Here in no particular order is a look at some films that glimpse science through a personal lens: Iron Man (2009): The premise of a lone genius who concocts an indestructible suit is crackers, according to Caltech physicist Sean Carroll. But the movie's second half, depicting crackup after crackup of botched Iron Man tests, is a lot like real life in a lab, where repeated failure is the rule and humiliation always hides inside the next test tube. "And that's why I loved Iron Man," Carroll wrote on his Preposterous Universe blog. Full story here