Atonement

"I love you. I'll wait for you. Come back. Come back to me."

Directed by Joe Wright
2008
Date Viewed: Saturday March 20, 2010

Atonement opens beautifully. First you see a playhouse, then it pans out slowly and then you see a long trail of toy animals littered across the floor. You hear the sounds of a typewriter and finally you see Briony (Saoirse Ronan) at the typewriter finishing her play. She grabs the paper out of the typewriter along with a stack of papers next to it and runs through the huge, gorgeous house to find her mother. In the meantime, the typewriter sounds have been integrated with the music. Every so often throughout the movie you'll hear the typewriter mixed in with the music. I thought it was really cool. Atonement is about Briony and her sister Cecilia (Keira Knightley) and the gardener's son Robbie (James McAvoy). Basically Briony is a bored and bratty little girl who misunderstands the things that she sees. And she's kind of a creeper. She ends up falsely accusing Robbie of raping her cousin. Which of course since it's a movie, they take the word of a 13 year old girl without really adequately investigating... It is really cool though because the movie shows what Briony sees when she's creeping about and then it shows what really happened. Briony and Cecilia end up being war nurses (separately) and Robbie goes off to war after he gets out of prison. The movie ends up spanning about 50 years or so and throughout the whole thing you know who Briony is because she has the same. Exact. Haircut. For 50 years. Kind of a lame-o.... I ended up enjoying this movie more than I thought I would. It was kind of long and I can't stand Keira Knightley but it still definately deserves a B