Cheap Cds - Atonement [2007]

Back to Atonement [2007]

Spotlight customer reviews:
Customer Rating:

Summary: 9/10. History, narrative, truth and fiction
Comment: Atonement is a stunning period melodrama adapted from Ian McEwan's novel of the same name. Directed
by Joe Wright (Pride and Prejudice) from a script by Christopher Hampton (Dangerous Liaisons, The
Quiet American), it slips comfortably into a canon of great historical dramas from those of
Merchant-Ivory to Anthony Minghella's The English Patient. While it shares those films' lavish and
atmospheric attention to period detail (this time the build up to the second world war and then its
consequences), it also shares their thematic subtlety and complexity, largely thanks to an
intelligent re-reading of the original novel.

Like McEwan's book, the film focuses on
issues of narrative and memory, and there are some clever and disorientating tricks played on the
narrational perspective in the film. The first half of film revolves, in part, around the
destructive naivety of Briony, whose lies and/or misinterpretations have disastrous consequences for
her older sister and lover. A precocious 13-year-old with ambitions to be a playwrite, the sound of
Briony's typewriter opens the film and becomes a percussive force in it's score, underwriting the
dramatic tension as a horribly inexorable miscarriage of justice unfolds. This clever use of the
typewriter in the music underlines a sense of fiction playing a driving force in the events, which
unfold with melodramatic inevitability.

A seed of distrust in what we see - to separate
fact from fiction - is deliberately planted in the mind of the viewer as several scenes are repeated
from alternative perspectives. Taken independently, these first 45 minutes or so are as tightly
constructed as any in modern cinema; impelled forward with an erotic charge, tension and sense of
impending catastrophe.

What happens subsequently seems at first to rob the film of its
initial momentum, as we the narrative takes us far away from the landed classes of rural England to
the battlefields of Dunkirk. This middle section of the film is conspicuously dream-like and
shapeless compared to the purposeful editing and driving score of the early scenes. As is later
hinted though, there is a suggestion that what we see is not entirely real but imagined or
interpreted.

There is a virtuoso long take on the beaches at Dunkirk at the end of the
war as the protagonist Robbie (James McAvoy) wanders around through crowds of demobalised troops in
what can only be described as a Hieronymus Bosch-like vision of hell. In fact, as they come over the
dunes to witness this spectacle of drunken soldiers fighting, singing, riding children's carousels
and shooting their horses, one character remarks, "it looks like something from the Bible". This
sequence is as impressionistic and stylised a vision of conflict as Apocalypse Now - akin to
entering a vast and detailed tableaux. What is clear is that this is a different version of history
- and what is history afterall but narrative - to that commonly accepted. Moreover, with Robbie lost
among all this chaos and disorganisation, we are impelled to think of his narrative as having been
disrupted; warped and obscure.

And that is what the film gives us a stong feeling of
more than any other - that the big, almost ineffable narratives of the great wars steal the private
stories of millions of people. The happiness of Robbie and Cecilia and millions like them is denied
them not just by the lies of a little girl but by the carnage and chaos of conflict. Ideas related
to narrative and truth are also provoked in the surprising final segment, which I will not spoil for
first-time viewers by divulging here. A deeply profound and moving film, this deserves to considered
one of the greats of modern cinema.

Customer Rating:

Summary: Very Modern
Comment: Watching this film in a Multiplex cinema was certainly a very unique experience. I believe that it
looses much of its scope on DVD or on a small screen TV (I watched it on a plane ride for the second
time.) This is one of those films that must be watched more than once in order to fully grasp the
symbolism and undertones presented in it. After watching Atonement, one gets the impression that the
director and screenwriter have been very faithful to the book on which the film is based on. The
continuous use of flashbacks gives the plot much needed development. All in all, it is a thoroughly
modern film, sometimes perhaps a bit too modern for the time period it attempts to portray. />

Customer Rating:

Summary: Brilliant, one of my 2007 Top Ten :D
Comment: What more can I say? Brilliant acting all round, great score and cinematography from Seamus
McGarvey and deft directing from Joe Wright - once again - a sterling collaboration between cast and
crew all round. And I felt it did the book complete justice, especially considering it's difficult
structure. It also seemed to sweep through it's two-hour duration and left me wanting more, despite
the anguishing ending. :D

Customer Rating:

Summary: Beautiful
Comment: Beautifully shot, expertly acted, gripping, sad - a perfect movie!

Customer Rating:

Summary: Atonement
Comment: This film us utterly compelling, its beautifull, its tragic, its tense, its moving and it is
heartbreaking.
Ian McEwan captures the very essence and cruelty of love, i have never seen
anything like it, its sheer genius; Romeo and Juliet only less innocent, and much more
passionate.
Watch this film

Back to Atonement [2007]

Showing page 33 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 |