Agora - Maths and Sandals

I don't really know how this one passed me by when it was released way back in 2009, but a film about mathematicians is the kind of thing that's normally on my radar from the moment it's first advertised. Maybe they ran a really low-key marketing campaign after realising that a story about 4th century scientists wouldn't sell too well. As it transpired imdb recommended this to me when I was looking something up bout 'Primer' last year, and yesterday I popped the DVD in the PS3 for a watch.

The story is this: Hypatia (Rachel Weisz) is a 4th century philosopher studying and teaching in the Library of Alexandria - a great centre of learning in the Roman world. She is living at a time of change; the Roman Empire has recently legalised Christianity and followers of the young religion are fervently spreading its belief into all aspects of life. With the slow collapse of Rome's influence across its empire, there is a gap in people's beliefs which the Christians are eager to fill. The scientists of Rome and Egypt associate themselves with the gods of old though, and a conflict becomes inevitable.

At its most basic this is a story warning of the dangers of fundamentalist religion. The film depicts the influence of dogma as corrosive to free thinkers and destructive to society and civilisation. You'll get no argument out of me regarding this thesis. We see Hypatia as a woman interested only in her science, but persecuted by the Christians as a 'whore' and a 'witch' for the influence she has over her ex-students - now leaders and clerics in Alexandria. I think that the film can either be taken as a historical epic or a warning about the modern rising tide of Islamic extremism (and how fundamentalist Christianity isn't very different from it).

Importantly the religious sects in the film are not uniformly painted as backward. The fanatical Christians are in one scene shown to be of the belief that the world is round (a common misconception is that everyone thought the world was flat until renaissance times - in fact it was well-known that the world was round in ancient Greek times). This helps the film avoid being labelled as a taking a dogmatic anti-religion viewpoint - the 'Richard Dawkins factor' as I like to call it. Instead it takes a more considered approach, which helps its credibility.

That said though, the film is a little sluggish and takes huge liberties with history. Although Wikipedia agrees with the assertion that Hypatia was perhaps the first woman of note in the history of mathematics and that her death at the hands of a Christian mob is an event that serves quite nicely as a metaphor for the coming dark age in Europe; the film's suggestion that she somehow pre-empted Johannes Kepler's 17th century discovery of the elliptical orbit of planets is totally without basis. In short, 'Agora' is an interesting film that opened my eyes to a little-considered part of history. It's heart is in the right place with regard to its depiction of the influence of religious cults, but despite this (and a great performance from Weisz) it's just too dry. Which is a shame, as I was rather hoping to be able to sing the praises of a little-known modern epic about maths.