As rotten as its subject

Rating: 2/10 (18 April 2017)

I guess probabilities exist that would see me taking out Aliens and Cowboys, Child 44, and this piece of crap from the library on the same day. All three suck, and often in the same way.
This movie is a Mean Girls with level-1 Tarantino, a schedule II Shyamalan, with an Altman tracking shot kicker. The Tarantino is because it jumps around in time, a very 1990s device and pretty bankrupt in this day and age. Worse yet, it plays the exact same scene over, just from a slightly different POV, so it wastes your time while it confused the story-line. Its a Shyamalan since it has a sociopath twist at the end. This allows the writers to hurt you the same way the creeptastic girl in the story hurts everyone around her.
The Altman kicker is the long tracking shot at Dunkirk, in a scene that was irrelevant to the story. Its as if these young directors have to brag at cocktail parties, "Oh I shot a horse chase in the desert (Aliens and Cowboys), or in this case, "Oh I shot a beach scene from WWII." Because the technology of movie-making has advanced so much, the scene does look better, but these self-absorbed directors put it down solely to their genius.
The horror of this movie is that it made money and got acclaim, which will only encourage more of this self-indulgent crap. I guess if your brain is still infantile, and you like pretty colors and distracting sounds, yeah, this film is great for that. If you have moved past a noisy mobile dancing over your crib, to the point where things have to make at least a little sense, this movie is atrocious.
Acting is good, other than direction that has them all seem autistic, as they all pause for 12 seconds rather than respond to whatever manufactured senseless dramatic situation they are faced with. Direction is so inept he changes the actress playing the "star" and also starts referring to her by her last name instead of her first. What point in this crap, symbolism she is changing? Go back to film school, and stay there.
Robin Williams said "Cocaine is God's way of telling you that you make too much money." A deleted scene titled "Walking through the fields" is God's way of telling you that you have too much budget.
The movie is titled Atonement, but that is not what it is about. First off, there is no atonement. The creep girl does not recant until she is 79 years old. Robbie's mother, her parents, everyone she hurt is dead. Cumberbatch is dead, unable to reply to her new accusations. Some atonement. The movie seems to be a love story, until the Shyamalan happens and its all a lie, told by the lying sociopath narcissist girl who ruins everyone's life, including the people that watch this drek.
So just when you think are are watching a move about a young couple, its really about this despicable creepy crap brat. Great, I love to see scheming creep sociopaths, especially ones that maneuver their lies into a big life payoff.
You could toss out all the war scenes and the scenes with Anorexic Girl. Then it would be about Briony. You would have to expand her POV and linearize the story line. Thing is, who would want to watch this creepy little liar? A novelist might think the story is all about the little budding writer, but everyone else sees her as an ancillary little distraction to life. A dork.
There were implausibilities. Like why didn't the police re-trace Robbie's path to prove he couldn't have tried to rape the girl? And prison for attempted rape, pretty much a mild assault? No, hardly. Even if her daddy was Lord Truplewaite of Devon on Hardwicke.
The movie was like a promo reel for the director, showing off his scenes, the hiding from the Boche, the trudging in the field, the hospital scene. I guess that is why I hate this movie so much. The soldiers coming into the hospital moved me to tears, and rather than stick to a coherent logical story, he had to bounce off to his next self-indulgent show-off clip reel.
I agree with another commentator. That there is a privileged class in the world that never had to work at anything and always is guaranteed to have a happy ending. So a happy ending is boring to them, whereas to us its the rarest of occurrences. I am sorry that the Marie Antoinettes of the world like this movie, it shows we are in need of a colony collapse disorder.