‘Radioactive’ On Amazon: The Story Of An Inspiring Woman Starring Rosamund Pike

Rosamund Pyke as Marie Curie in ‘Radioactive’ (Photo credit: Molly Albright/Amazon Studios)

Amazon Studios

Radioactive begins with the death of Marie Curie. As she is wheeled into hospital, the film suggests she is remembering her first meeting with her husband. Life flashes before our eyes before we die, the saying goes. The film proposes itself, if you will, to be these momentary flashes of the lifetime of a pioneering woman.

Radioactive was directed by Marjane Satrapi (Persepolis) from a script written by Jack Thorne, which was based on the graphic novel “Radioactive: Marie & Pierre Curie: A Tale of Love and Fallout” by Lauren Redniss. Marie Curie is played rather brilliantly by Rosamund Pike, who portrays her as a socially awkward, but feisty, impulsive and determined woman who has no time for nonsense. Pierre Curie is played by Sam Riley, who portrays the equally brilliant scientist as a calm and loving husband.

Although the film starts with romance—a cute chance meeting between Maria Skłodowska and Pierre Curie on a Parisian street—Radioactive is a biopic film on one of the greatest female scientists of the twentieth century, who won two Nobel prizes during her lifetime—the first woman to have done so—for physics (which she shared with her husband) and chemistry. While the film shows Pierre’s and Marie’s love blossoming, Radioactive seems more interested in Marie’s life and achievements since the day she met Pierre, spending little time on Marie’s childhood.

Rosamund Pyke and Sam Riley as Marie and Pierre Curie in ‘Radioactive’ (Photo credit: Molly … [+] Albright/Amazon Studios)

Amazon Studios

Conducting her research at the Sorbonne, Marie is struggling to find her place in this very male-dominated environment. When she meets Pierre Curie, he is Professor in the School of Physics of the Sorbonne, and he invites her to come work in his laboratory. Together, although Marie is at first reluctant to collaborate, they discover two new elements, radium and polonium. The film goes into great lengths to explain the process Marie and Pierre devised to find these two new elements. It does this rather cleverly by having the two scientists explain the science to one of their colleague’s wife (who is not a scientist), interweaving this conversation with illustrations for the audience to get a clearer picture of what they are saying.

Making a biopic on one of the most revered woman of the twentieth century is in itself a difficult task without falling into some kind of pitfall. Radioactive is a respectful biopic that does not seek to judge nor glorify its subject. Satrapi does not depict Curie’s life through rose-tinted glasses, but rather green ones. The color green, the color of the glowing radium, pervades throughout the film to emphasize how this element colored and shaped Curie’s life. Curie’s family life intertwined with her researching work, the latter taking precedence over the former, the film suggests.

The biopic, however, tries to go beyond just a straight forward life story, to infer the consequences to Curies’ discoveries. The film thus shows how their discovery of radium would later help treat cancer, giving an example from a 1957 cancer patient from Cleveland who was treated with radiation. The film will later show us the destructive consequence to their discoveries, which led to the making of the atomic bomb. Although it is a nice idea to bring in the long-term repercussions to their work, the way it is done here creates a rather confusing timeline, bringing us out of the storyline at very odd moments. Images of the Enola Gray about to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, for example, come straight after Pierre accepts the Nobel prize.

Radioactive is a very interesting film about a pioneering woman for science and feminism, that really looks at her life and achievements comprehensively, but it does take a while to get into it. The film is on Amazon Prime since July 24.