Cheap Cds - Atonement [2007]

Back to Atonement [2007]

Spotlight customer reviews:
Customer Rating:

Summary: Exquiste photography
Comment: This wonderfully gripping and emotional romance has to be one of the best looking films in years. I
have grown tired of dull 'realistic' bluey - grey monochrome films of late, films where the director
insists of shakey camera shots and endless and pointless fast cutting. Thankfully Atonement is a
feast for the eyes. From the glorious photography of summer at the house - just look at the use of
light and colour - to the amazing war time scenes it shows a director who knows just what to do. The
actors and script are brilliant but technically it should take every award going. Full marks for a
fine classic film.

Customer Rating:

Summary: What a Load of Old Tosh!!
Comment: After all the hype I was expecting something exceptional. This is melodrama by numbers, not a wet
eye in the house.A huge dissapointment, I think the judges for "Best Film" must have been watching
something else!
Wanna buy a second hand dvd?

Customer Rating:

Summary: Who will atone for the hype?
Comment: This is the most massively overhyped movie of the last twelve months and it successfully manages to
hide behind a veneer of 'English Patient'-ness, to suggest it is better than it is. The book is
wonderful. A beautiful, extraordinary piece of writing. And so it should have stayed. The main
problem with this movie is that there is not a single moment of spontaneity on screen. Every single
frame is crafted and planned. Now, if that is your kind of movie, go to it. But for those of us who
like to believe that movies 'bottle lighting' then this is not for you. Dry, dull, overly delighted
in the director's ability to place a camera and choreograph a scene, and saddled with a supermodel
who purports to be an actress in the leading role, this is the movie for you if you imagine that
veneer and gloss and fabricated emotion can successfully masquerade for the real thing.
/>Four words: don't believe the hype.

Customer Rating:

Summary: Oscars My A**E!
Comment: There's no doubt this film has some serious problems, particularly in the first fifty minutes which
is badly structured, uninvolving, pretentious and totally uncinematic. It certainly improves towards
the final part of the movie, but I don't think a film can really recover when the first half is so
lame. Furthermore, there's zero chemistry between McEvoy and Knightley (her performance is
particularly poor). This is perfectly illustrated in a scene where they meet at a restaurant, a
scene so stilted and laughable it's actually embarrassing to watch and looks like a spoof of Brief
Encounter.
During the last half hour the film picks up considerably, with some excellent
directorial touches aswell as fine editing and cinematography. It even becomes moving when the final
twists are revealed, but these revelations would have been so much more potent if the early part of
the movie hadn't been so tedious. It's a real shame because this is the kind of material that could
have been turned into a masterpiece with a better structured storyline and more charismatic actors.

Customer Rating:

Summary: A cinematic 'emperor's new clothes'
Comment: Perhaps it's inevitable when a film receives the kind of attention and hype that Atonement has,
audiences coming to the film late tend to wonder what the fuss is about. This is a good looking
film. But in every other way it is difficult to understand the critical plaudits. Knightley and
McAvoy are fine, but their's are not stand out performances. The writing is okay but suffers from
the common problem of being more superficial than the source material.

The great flaw
as I see it is the ending, which is a cheat and the worst, most cliched cheat at that: "it was all a
dream" (albeit inverted from the norm - where usually this device returns a nightmare to order,
Atonement uses the dream to dramatize a love, a relationship that was in reality impossible). The
'reveal' then undoes all of the emotion the viewer has invested, the connection to the characters
and their situation, which up to this point is substantial. The ending is meant to be hopeful I
suspect, but the message seems to be that such hope is only possible in fiction, in the imagination.
And once the reveal is made, the rest of the story unravels - how much of this happened? Is it all
just an inconsequential fiction written by a popular but mediocre, dying novelist, trying to
recapture the voice of a child? This sense of the story having no reality is augmented by some of
the imagery in the film - the bodies floating in a flooded tube station, chocolate factory
millionaires, inconceivably grand houses, a dream-like version of WW2. Put simply, the story is a
lie that manipulates the audience to feel a certain way before taking great delight in making the
viewer feel foolish.

The sense of the 'emperor's new clothes' lies in the lack of
comment about the awful, hackneyed device at the core of the film, as if it's easier to pretend it's
clever or illuminating than to feel, quite simply, cheated.

Back to Atonement [2007]

Showing page 27 of 37
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 |
16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 |
31 | 32 | 33 | 34 | 35 | 36 | 37 |