The award winning BBC Horizon Special Life Story is to be rescreened tonight at 23:00 hours BST the listings
..the imdb match..
Not the world's best piece of film making, perhaps, but this is one of the most historically accurate movies ever made about science. As a biology teacher, I found it a great way to cover a rather difficult part of the syllabus. I'm sorry all those other biology students found it so boring; I can only hope that if their teachers had explained what was going on a bit better they would have found more to enjoy. This is a particularly good portrayal of the often bizarre and non-linear way in which science works, in contrast to the typical unrealistic expositions about the scientific method. The discovery of the structure of DNA was one of the most ground-breaking advances in 20th Century science, and one which is still having and will continue to have an enormous impact on our lives, so the value of the film as a depiction of history is very significant.
The only things that annoyed me were Jeff Goldblum's usual failure to speak clearly (made even worse in some scenes by talking with his mouth full of food) and all the rather puerile digressions (accurate though they may have been) about James Watson's tastes in girls