Radioactive

Radioactive (2019), an Amazon original written by Jack Thorne and directed by Marjane Satrapi, was something that interested me when I saw it on Prime, but has rather let down by. The movie follows scientist Marie Curie (played by Rosamund Pike) through the late 1800s into the early 20th century and the process of her life when she and her husband, Pierre Curie (played by Sam Riley), delved into the search of radium, a yet unknown substance at the time.

Radioactive opened on Marie’s death in 1934 and was thrust into a flashback when she first met Pierre on the streets of Paris. The timing along with the music feels like they tried to do something very nostalgic, but it also felt forced, unnatural, as did the rest of this movie.

The acting is very well done, from actors who have delivered fantastic performances before, yet the characters and story beats lack something to entice us to care about anything going on or anyone involved. She is absolutely more the better actor than he. His character sounds like he has one cadence no matter what emotion he is supposed to be feeling. Any emotion in this movie feels forced on us through the music, which the rest of the movie doesn’t support. The music wants me to feel one way, the shots another, all piled up on the acting which made me totally lost.

All that being said, I think it is beautifully crafted. Radioactive is a series of gorgeous moving photographs, moving music, and real acting, but I think the biggest flaw of this movie is the directorial vision and overall flow of the writing. It doesn’t hook onto story beats or personal elements and no direction, no flow, no unifying reason or vision can be felt. I’m not sure what story I am being told, or why I should care about it.

It is a movie about science and the scientific process, but movies about science are still in the end about people and we still need to connect with them. The montage sequence of the second act doesn’t work. Ford v Ferrari was also a movie about the relationship between two people and their journey to solving small problem after small problem throughout their process, but Ford v Ferrari actually focused on the issues and emotional attachments between the two main and supporting characters.

Perhaps that is what this movie needs, more characters. It needs more deep, compelling characters that we latch onto and to give the two main characters beats and times to grow and build off of. It needs moments to really hold onto, moments between people, moments of success and failure. What Radioactive does is introduce characters at times that have no rhyme or reason. If they come back at all, it feels very unplanned and inopportune to serving the story.

Much like characters, Radioactive has flash forwards in time that I can tell have a reason to be there, but I believe are done improperly. The first is to the bomb on Hiroshima which is meant to show the potential dangers of radium, though I do not believe it achieves the effect the filmmakers wanted. Later it flashes forward to Nuke Town, the testing site in Nevada, and later to the Chernobyl disaster. They were meant to support the feeling of isolation and hate that Marie was receiving but it only took us out of the moment that could have been extremely strong.

I thought at first their set ups have very little if any payoffs, but then I realized it was a movie with massive payoffs and no strong set ups, so it doesn’t make sense. There are not enough strong set ups so the payoffs are forced, pushed through the hole of a verbal argument that cuts back and forth between a shot and its reverse. It feels like they revert to using flashbacks and the like when they don’t know where to take the story.

To be short and concise in my approach here: it doesn’t flow well.

The midpoint feels like the end. Or perhaps what should have been the climax to be followed by a short finale if the rest of the movie was done well… or perhaps otherwise it should have been the end of act 1. From there, I got even more lost as to what movie I was watching and what story was trying to be told. The story of Marie’s life sure, but themes and motifs eluded me, and the only thing keeping me watching was Pike’s performance, which was not enough to save the movie.

The different segments of the movie would probably work by themselves, fully fleshed out, or if each were given an episode in a limited series. If the filmmakers picked and chose powerful moments to really focus on that all pushed toward an end motif and vision this story would have worked beautifully, because it is an amazing story that changed history.

If the vision was to be her looking back at her life, which only donned on me at the end of the movie, then I believe they should have alluded back to that moment throughout the movie while still following the above prescribed changes. The fatal flaw of this movie was still the one missing through line. I think they payoffs could have worked oh so well if only the set ups were more fleshed out and if the movie could be boiled down to an overarching need of Marie’s, which the substories should have supported or purposefully antagonized.

In the end, this movie wanted to be a limited series squeezed into two hours of a feature film. It was made by people who have accomplished geat things in all departments which leads me to believe this was simply a flop, or that there were a many great unseen obstacles this production faced. Perhaps it was rushed, perhaps it was planned as a limited series squashed into two hours, we don’t know. But it does not seem to reflect the track record of all those involved.

August 14, 2020