'Radioactive' film review: Bland, transparent Oscar bait bores while ill-serving a legend
The two-time, groundbreaking Nobel Prize winning scientist deserved better than the jagged, melodrama 'Radioactive' (streaming on Prime Video starting July 24). This is the pedestrian caliber of biopic that a lazy science teacher or substitute teacher would play for a science classroom as a passive lesson on the life of Marie Curie.
In short: The true-story of Marie Curie (Rosamund Pike) and her Nobel Prize-winning work in Chemistry and Physics. Sam Riley, Simon Russell Beale and Anya Taylor-Joy.
This bland docudrama feels like a polished episode of "Masterpiece Theater" featuring one of today's strongest, underrated actors. "Masterpiece" presentations are fine TV shows, yet they are not very cinematic or compelling. And 'Radioactive' has no story arch or character trajectory - it's just a string of historical events under the artifice of a narrative structure.
"Radioactive" falls into the same trap that so many overly ambitious biopics fall into: trying to cover too much material spread across too many years. The bulk of the film documents four decades of Curie's life - with little in the way of a cohesive or compelling character arc. This plays less like an engaging character-focused story ... but more like a recitation of events that happened to Curie. Actions films are the most susceptible to “and then” plots - but ‘Radioactive’ proves biopics can stumble into the same plot quagmire.
Early on in the film, a character describes Marie Curie as "impossibly dramatic," which itself is an apt description of Pike's performance - but is not a great summation of 'Radioactive' as a whole. The basics of drama require a character to have stakes and for those stakes to be threatened by various conflicts. 'Radioactive' is anemic on both of these fronts. Yes, Curie often finds herself at odds with those around her - but the conflicts always seemingly just drop out of the sky with very little, and sometimes no, build up.
At one point a character happily exclaims "They finally made me a professor!" OK, that's awesome - however, the film never establishes this character's want or desire to be a professor. Or how this new development might affect Curie. The plot point is just simply stated and the story moves forward until 'Radioactive' bumps into the next, random character conflict that seemingly falls out of the sky.
None of this is good - but the clunky, eye-rolling dialogue is also cringe, adding a new dimension of bad atop an already weak “story.” A disturbing percentage of the dialogue is just pure exposition - mainly just flatly describing how obtuse other scientists of Marie Curie's time were or simply characters flatly stating how they feel in the moment. "I guess everything changes, now doesn't it?" "We've already changed science forever." This is the type of placeholder dialogue more at home in a first draft - not the shooting script of a major motion picture starring an Academy Award-winning performer.
And if all of that wasn't off-putting enough, 'Radioactive' just wedges in some jarring time jumps. While Curie's story takes place from the late 1890s through the 1930s, the film drops in small vignettes that take place well after Curie's death. This is ostensibly intended to touch on the benefits and terrible consequences of Curie's discoveries - but the film never takes a firm declaration of Curie's legacy. The script just throws in the scientific developments of radiation (the blessings and the curses) and just says "yep, these things happened too. Moving right along." But like everything else in this film, these scenes are just dropped into the movie, with only some meager connective tissue - resulting in an amorphous narrative without a firm intention or voice or point.
Final verdict: This competently put together biopic does a serviceable job of documenting Marie Curie's life and work, but its perfunctory execution makes 'Radioactive' informative but heartless and not compelling.
Score: 2/5
'Radioactive' streams on Prime Video starting July 24. This horror film is rated PG-13 for thematic elements, disturbing images, brief nudity and a scene of sensuality and has a running time of 109 minutes.
