Just watched film Radioactive on Amazon Prime last night. Promoted as a biographical film of Mari Curie.
While it has some redeeming moments I was left with a feeling of “meh” at the end. Which by the following morning had turned to deep disappointment.
Pro:
It does show highlights from her time discovering radium and onwards, including her winning the Noble Prize not just once but twice and her work with ambulances and portable x-ray machines during WWI. It shows a strong female scientist and mentions some of the obstacles she dealt with.
It doesn’t sugar-coat the heroine. She wasn’t always the easiest person to get along with and as portrayed her she’s a human being with flaws and not a Mary Sue.
It touches on the ambivalence of radiation and radioactivity, with a nice simile with the use of high explosives in both industry for positive purposes and negatively for destruction BUT this rapidly becomes overdone in the film (see next section)
Con
It’s very unfocused at times, occasionally deviating into images that only loosely connect with the story.
Too much exposition at times when the story could be better served by showing, not telling.
Cardboard characters: as an example Professor Lippman as stand-in for all the sexist obstructionists in her life. His only purpose in this movie is to act as a foil for Curie.
At times even the main character - Marie Curie - becomes an exposition spouting cardboard cut-out of herself.
Bizarre time-skips into the future, mostly showing the downside of radiation and radioactivity. It’s distracting and would be better summed up at the end, after her death. Why are we getting vignettes about Hiroshims and Chernobyl in a biopic about Marie Curie? Sure, she made those possible but they occurred after her death.
I really wish they had not glossed over the toll radiation took on the early researchers. It was all shown as a “cough” (granted, bloody at times) but so vague as to be an unspecified illness when in reality early researchers were having to have fingers and even arms amputated due to tissue destruction. There were faint allusions to her failing vision (believed to be due to radiation-induced cataracts) and anemia but again, it was more exposition than anything else.
Most Damning of All:
Whoever wrote this played fast and loose with the facts.
I have a real problem with that. Her life was remarkable, and if this is supposed to be a biography it should be truthful. I am not familiar with the graphic novel this movie is supposedly based on so I can’t say how closely the movie adheres to it, or how the novel adheres to actual history.
Overall, a disappointment. I do not recommend it, and if you do watch it, please look up the actual history.