Radioactive should have been a slam dunk. The life of Marie Curie is ripe for cinematic adaptation, and this one is directed by Marjane Satrapi, the French-Iranian filmmaker behind the autobiographical animation Persepolis and the underrated black comedy The Voices. Unfortunately, despite the occasional touch of Satrapi’s stylistic flair, this biopic veers wildly between simply flat and downright incompetent. 

Despite feeling long at 110 minutes, the film somehow manages to feel rushed at the same time. Marie Skłodowska goes from meeting Pierre Curie to marrying him in what seems like seconds flat, while the major scientific discovery of their careers is presented almost as an afterthought. Some ideas, like Curie’s outsider status as a Polish immigrant, are skimmed over, while others are hammered home so often it’s hard not to feel like Satrapi is insulting our intelligence. We all understand the potential for great harm that the Curies made possible, yet she insists on showing us the Hiroshima bombings and the Chernobyl disaster just to make sure.

It must be said that Rosamund Pike does decent work as Marie Curie, and she has a believable chemistry with Sam Riley as her husband and scientific partner. But they’re both forced to contend with Jack Thorne’s screenplay, which is full of thuddingly awful dialogue and characters loudly discussing the themes of the film. “It must have been difficult,” says Curie’s daughter Irène (an underused Anya Taylor-Joy) towards the end, “to do everything that you did as a woman.” Presumably in the sequel, Thorne will have Irène, a Nobel prize-winner in her own right, prove that water is wet and bears shit in woods.

A figure who towers over history like Marie Curie deserves a biopic that crackles with energy, but Radioactive could be outshone by an inanimate carbon rod.

RATING: 2/5

INFORMATION

CAST: Rosamund Pike, Sam Riley, Anya Taylor-Joy, Aneurin Barnard, Simon Russell Beale

DIRECTOR: Marjane Satrapi

WRITERS: Jack Thorne (screenplay), Lauren Redniss (based on the graphic novel by)

SYNOPSIS: A story of the scientific and romantic passions of Marie Skłodowska-Curie and Pierre Curie, and the reverberation of their discoveries throughout the 20th century.