Character Brief

The Scientist

When we first meet the Scientist, he is a broken man. His faith in technology and progress has been torn down in an instant, his own ambition and imagination becoming his worst enemy as the machine he built to 'save everybody' does the exact opposite. He is consumed by remorse due to the accident, however his faith is not entirely extinguished; he still believes that through careful application of his trade, there is still a chance to write his past wrongs. However, when this fails, his mind fractures under the weight of his own guilt.

The Scientist represents two conflicting philosophies; the belief that science is a tool for the betterment of the human condition, but also that it can destroy as easily as create, that human ambition can be a destructive force if we lose sight of our goals, or allow them to consume us. At the end of the film, when the Scientist introduces fire to the Earth's inheritors, it is perhaps a desire to return to a simpler, almost child-like view of science, and posits that there are obvious yet complex wonders all around us when we look, and that when stripped down, science is about the discovery of new wonders rather than the fulfillment of some god-like ambition to fix everybody's problems.