Atonement Details

[Highly rated reviewer]

everyone who left a 5 star rating needs to atone for their sins!

Absolutely the most boring film ever! I'm a literary student and usually love adaptations but this film is so slow moving. Dont go there!

Deepy Depressing

The fact that this film is so universally applauded and is set to clean up at the Oscars is depressing beyond measure. It is a truly awful film and it is bizarre that no-one has publicly outed it as such.

Essentially, Atonement is a boring film badly acted. That would be fine and there are a million such films which don't deserve the condemnation of this one. What makes Atonement quite so terrible is its presentation of itself as a great epic covering the great themes of love, betrayal, war and atonement. It is nothing of the sort.

Without McEwan's exceptional prose to seduce the viewer, the film exposes what a trite and nasty novel Atonement actually was. On the screen the perverse morality of the story is shockingly stark.

A thirteen year old girl makes a childish mistake and is punished for it for the rest of her life. Instead of condemning the ghastly characters who treat the girl so badly, the film seems to expect us to agree with them, and concur that the poor girl must spend the rest of her life atoning for her mistake.

The crassness of this central conceit is breathtaking, but the film doesn't stop there. What the film is really about is Love, and the great Love in Atonement is between two woodenly acted characters who have known each other for about five minutes before they have sex and then, through an ineptly contrived series of coincidences, are forced to separate. Then comes the war and the book's black heart is truly revealed. The Second World War, we learn, wasn't one of the most horrific and violent catastrophes of human history, it was actually rather beautiful, as shown by a horribly misguided seven-minute tracking shot of the Dunkirk evacuation. Furthermore we learn that the millions who died in the war and its massive historical consequences were irrelevant, its only real significance for the makers of this offensive film is as a neat means for the two spoiled protagonists to get back together and exact revenge on the child who accidentally interrupted their teenage romance.

It really is that horrible.