The Man Who Knew Infinity

This movie could have been the new A Beautiful Mind. But for that to have happened, the authors would have had to shoot it with a bit of emotion rather than self-centeredly focusing on themselves and thus offering nothing at all. Only boredom, empty characters and a plot that I didn’t care about for almost two hours. (27.02.2017)

The problem isn't that God knows the submissive autistic Ramanujan isn't a dramatically sustainable character for a movie biopic, because in my view everyone is, it's just that the approach has to be adapted accordingly. And this is not where attempts at making a "major motion picture" with twists, dramatic historical backdrops, and over-the-top panoramas fit in. This is because it makes the film fall into the classic post-colonial perception, defined by rich men with pipes and hats altruistically enabling the protagonist to do something and leaving him practically no opportunity to enter his story in any way, which gives him only one role, that of doing the same thing over and over again until Jeremy Irons somehow manages to try and wrangle the mathematician's approval. The film attempts to compensate for this shortcoming with the truly maddeningly hopeless storyline of Ramanujan's figurine wife waiting for him at home with a garland, which is the only meager link between the character and the viewer. Lastly, the film is absolutely horribly cut together, unnecessarily opening up thirty unnecessary little sub-plots that are pointless and that yield nothing but except that each of them brings the film a new scene. (31.10.2016)

I simply enjoy films like this. Sure, there's not that much mathematics in it in the end, but it doesn't really matter. This is a story that is strong on its own as a story of a person who didn't get as much time as they could have. What would he have achieved if he had more time to continue calculating and proving? Dev and Jeremy were classically great. (06.10.2016)