Allied
What the hell is this, why is Robert Zemeckis directing a soap opera for the Chinese? Sure, they laundered their money through Paramount, but there’s the Huahua company logo at the start, probably some Chinese billionaire front.
The references to Casablanca are very mild, this is really closer to a soap opera. It suffers from extreme main character overload, when their child is born, another pregnant woman is shoved aside to provide a gurney for her, during an aerial bombardment.
The MI5 are idiot buffoons, instead of turning her into another Pujol, they burn a functioning spy network for the Germans. If only they were this efficient against Kim Philby.
Even though Marion Cotillard’s character is really the main character, she is barely characterised, other than basic sex fiend (pre-marriage) and homemaker (post-marriage). After leading two spy networks in two countries, escaping assassination by Nazis, it’s hard to imagine her wanting to return to some London suburb and accept being a 50’s wife, cooking and taking care of a baby while bombs fall. She is clearly a spy, why not go back to some Canadian wasteland, if they want to get away from it all?
Brad Pitt is also an extreme doormat, but I can’t really blame him for falling for a coquette Marion Cotillard. The scene with the unbuttoned blouse is enough to break the resolve of most heterosexual males.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.