Darwin’s Brave New World

Socratis Otto stars as Charles Darwin in this three-disc docudrama about how the young evolutionist came up with his theories and the struggle he went through to make the world understand that man as we know him today owes a lot to ancestors he may not be willing to admit are his. The first part of the series works the best as we see Darwin aboard the HMS Beagle traveling around the South Pacific discovering strange and wonderful creatures that virtually no man – and certainly no scientist – has seen before. The program falters a bit when it tries to show Darwin’s struggle to boil down everything he saw into a single comprehensive theory. Part of the problem is that the filmmakers can’t really decide how to show the inner turmoil in images the audience can understand; it all looks a bit too trippy. The way they present his case in a readably understandable way, once Darwin has figured it all out, works much better.