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Telling the story of Marie Curie, one of the greatest minds ever and the only person to ever win Nobel Prizes in both chemistry and physics is a fantastic idea for Radioactive. Except of course when you try to squeeze in every biopic trope possible, making the film a cringe inducing needless CGI-fest.
We meet Marie Skłodowska played by Rosamund Pike, a Polish scientist living in France, who doesn’t get the respect she clearly deserves due to her gender and outspoken attitude. She is kicked out of her laboratory and no one else will take her in, until she meets Pierre Curie (Sam Riley), who is just as obstinate as she is. She reluctantly joins a partnership with Pierre and slowly falls in love with him as we see her discover two new elements, Polonium and Radium, which have wide ranging effects on the world, both positive and negative.
Unfortunately the film basically goes scene to scene charting the greatest highs and lows of her life, with no real concern for narrative structure or cohesion. We get scenes of Marie and Pierre winning the Nobel Prize, but only Pierre being named as the winner, we see radical new medical technology being invented for chemotherapy and x-ray machines, we see the atomic bomb created and dropped on Hiroshima and on and on. Biopics always want to get as much story in as possible but instead for the forest for the trees when trying to actually show us who the subject is. The film is shot on minimal sets of work rooms but for some reason director Marjane Satrapi decides to CGI all of 1800’s Paris filled with crane shots and neon lights. During montages we get the dreaded newspaper headline ticker tape parade forcing the viewer to stomach being told the same minimal information over and over again in ways they could have understood in much more subtle ways.
You also enter each scene knowing in advance what the exact dialogue would be as if a robot designed to only spit out cliches and over explanations. There are a few interesting flourishes like the flame dancer and the way the Radium is shot, but that is about it. Sam Riley gives about as middle of the road performance you can give and he is the strongest actor here. This is just another in a long list of forgettable biopics that come out every year with stars hoping to get awards attention.
Radioactive was seen during the 2020 Cinéfest Sudbury International Film Festival. Thank you to the festival for the press pass. Radioactive is currently available to stream on Amazon Prime.
