The Story of Everything on Prime | Documentary Review

About the Film

The Story of Everything
Documentary
Watch on Prime TV
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

Synopsis

The Story of Everything explores some of humanity’s biggest questions: Where did the universe come from? How did life begin? And what do modern scientific discoveries reveal about the possibility of design and purpose behind creation?

Featuring scientists, philosophers, and scholars from a variety of disciplines, the documentary examines evidence related to the origin of the universe, the fine-tuning of the cosmos, the complexity of life, and the information found within DNA. Drawing inspiration from Stephen C. Meyer’s bestselling book Return of the God Hypothesis, the film invites viewers to consider whether the story of everything points beyond matter and chance to a Mind behind the universe.

My Thoughts

I’ll be honest. The first twenty minutes and I were not getting along.

The documentary opens with discussions about cosmology, singularities, expanding universes, and enough scientific terminology to make my eyes cross.

Around the five-minute mark, I was already thinking, “What in the world is happening?”

Now, I have a rule when I review movies. I try to give every movie twenty minutes to grab me before I decide whether it’s working for me or not. So I stuck with it.

Part of my struggle wasn’t that the documentary was boring. It was that there was so much information coming at me that I felt like I wasn’t going to retain any of it unless I started taking notes.

And that’s exactly what I did.

What started as a few notes turned into pages of observations, timestamps, scientist names, arguments, and questions. Somewhere along the way I stopped the movie to get ready for a leadership retreat and realized I had somehow made it to the thirty-two minute mark.

By then, I was so busy making sure I didn’t miss anything important that I didn’t realize my twenty minutes had come and gone.

Unbeknownst to me, the documentary had grabbed me.

 

 

I will admit that part of the struggle with the first section was that it was making me angry at times. More than once I found myself thinking, “You’re so smart you’re stupid.”

But to be fair, every argument has two sides otherwise it’s not really making a case; it’s simply presenting a conclusion.

As the documentary moved beyond scientific discoveries and started asking bigger questions, things began to click. Questions about the beginning of the universe became questions about what caused that beginning. Questions about life became questions about information, design, and purpose.

That’s when I began to see where the filmmakers were going.

Was I glad I stuck with it? Absolutely.

Would I watch it again? Not anytime soon. My brain needs some time to let all of this percolate.

The Story of Everything presents a substantial amount of information and asks some big questions. By the time the credits rolled, I wasn’t reaching for the remote to start it over, but I was still thinking about many of the ideas it raised.

This isn’t a casual documentary. It asks viewers to pay attention, think critically, and follow along as it builds its case. Viewers interested in science, philosophy, theology, engineering, or the origins debate will likely find much to consider.

My final reaction could best be summed up by something my mother used to say, “Oh hoh.” (Spoken in a strong Trinidadian accent with heavy emphasis on the “hoh”).

In other words, I thought they had lost their minds in the beginning, but by the end I could see exactly where they were going.

Trailer

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