Die Vermessung der Welt

"I am French! I don't read foreigners." Says Emile in response to Alexander Humboldt's musings on Immanuel Kant. Now, who says German movies aren't funny? This one is and I loved it. Directed by Detlev Buck, the film follows two geniuses of the day, geographer/explorer Alexander Humbolt and mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss. Adapted from the best-selling novel by Daniel Kehlmann, we are presented with two independent plot strands. Well, maybe not so much plots as let's see how scientists fared in the 18th century - and that is what gives this film the drama: the how they lived.

Gauss had his adventures at home, in Germany. Humboldt his in the Amazon region. Great actors, lush locations (filmed in Germany, Austria and Ecuador) naturalistic production design, decent cinematography and relayed with situation comedy. You feel the cold, the dirt, the grime, the dampness, the horror of life in the late 1700s.

Don't see it as an attempt to give historical facts but to immerse the viewer in a time we can travel to through the eyes of this movie. I can only repeat: I quite loved it. Well done Buck.

We watched this garbage in german classes, and it has possibly been one of the worst pieces of cinema I've ever watched.

Terrible settings, inconsistent sound quality, horrible acting and some of the worst green screen I've seen in a long time.

The story of the two scientists of different qualities, gets less important the longer the film goes.

The romantic aspect has been a joke since the first minute and that does not change in the slightest.. Unnecessarily squeezed into the story is also the story you can also find the experiments these two scientists went through.

If you ask me, I cant even tell anymore which genre to fit this into.

Does it want to be a romantic, biopic, comedy, and a drama? Yes!

Is it enough to really tell and clearly put it into one of those? Definitely no!

I read the one scathing review and don't get that at all. I am a Probability and Statistics Professor who loves all history, even fictionalized accounts. I found the movie delightful. It made me want to research the lives of Gauss and Humboldt. It was a beautiful film and it made me want more. That is what I always want for my students! Anyone would see this as a sweet story of contemporaries juxtaposed by birth and passion. Getting a taste of the math/science in such a stunning way, visually... I would think it would make some appreciate the worlds of maths and science, and motivate some to look deeper. Lovely movie! (Sorry, angry German reviewer.)

Before I watched the movie, I read a review which said this movie fails to reflect scientists as they are, just like Big Bang Theory. I agree about Big Bang Theory (no offense, fans) but I have to disagree about this movie! It captures the minds of the two scientists well: The endless enthusiasm that makes Humboldt travel to the ends of the world, and the love of thinking and math Gauss has...The two share the problem of being different than others surrounding them, and the movie contrasts their personalities and fields, which I liked.

Two scenes affected me especially (don't worry, no major spoilers): The tooth extraction scene of Gauss and what he thinks over it, and when the two men talk about how curiosity stays...Having the mind of a scientist myself, the movie touched me!

It is very easy to write than Gauss and von Humboldt are reduced as fictional sketches, first by novel, than by its adaptation. but the film has two virtues - to be a start point for viewer to discover the life of two great scientists and to admire the spirit of period. the basic sin of film - the bizarre use of humour and the not inspired links between the lead characters. sure, it is fiction. sure, the target is real large . but something, after bitter critics, remains. the passion for a cause. the forms of schizoid perspective about life. and the portrait of a world. not the best, far to be the most inspired. but not so awful.