Banish the dull images of test tubes and musty lecture halls when considering Radioactive (available on Amazon Prime starting July 24th). The biopic traces the career trajectory of Madame Marie Curie (a magnificent Rosamund Pike), the Polish immigrant born Maria Salomea Skłodowska who became the first person — and the only woman — to win two Nobel prizes. She shared the first in 1903, for discovering radium and polonium (named after her native country), with her French husband and fellow physicist Pierre Curie (Sam Riley). And the historical drama would be a dutiful thing, indeed, if it merely ticked off a list of Marie’s accomplishments, including being the first woman to become a professor at the University of Paris.
The movie whizzes around from present to future to show the major benefits of isolating radioactive isotopes to treat cancer. Such experiments came with risks: Marie died of exposure to radiation in 1934 at age 66.
Q-tips say: Good movie only if they would have just stuck to the scientific facts & her accomplishments. However, the movie finds time to show the destructive force of radium in the bombs that fell on Hiroshima in 1945 and the lives lost due to the 1986 nuclear disaster at Chernobyl. Marie could never have known of these events, and some have faulted the filmmaker for dragging them into her story and breaking the narrative flow.
Q-tips say: Shameful to bring in the destructive issues into the movie.