Atonement

While a good movie Atonement is not as good as I anticipated it would be. It just didn't have quite the emotional punch I thought it would have from the previews. The story itself was good although a bit choppy due to the manner in which it was put together.

They would show you basically the end of a scene and then back up and show you then entire scene from a different perspective. It made the story a little confusing at first. Once you got use to that it just made the movie a little weird in how it flowed and kind of slowed it down. To some extent I see why they did it the way they did but, for the most part I still feel like they could have done it differently and done a better job with it.

The movie is based on a book and normally that doesn't have an impact to me when seeing the movie. Generally I haven't read the book and the movie works as a movie. However, this time I really felt like there was a lot of stuff that was missing. There just seemed to be wholes in the story and things that I'm sure a little more detail could have really helpted the movie. The was very evident at the end of the movie. Which seemed to just come out of nowhere.

As for the acting. It was all good even though Keira Knightly and James McAoy really didn't seem to have that much to do. They did a great job with what little bit of emotion they did have to play with. And they did work well together. Even though I haven't seen many of the other nominated performances I do understand why they didn't get Oscar nominations. What I don't understand is how Saoirse Ronan got nominated for playing Keira's sister. There was nothing special or not worthy about the performance.

One thing I really liked about the overall presentation of the movie had to do with an interesting sound thing they did. You could probably say it was almost part of the score of the film. A big part of the story involves the little sisters imagination and her writing, which is done on a type writer. They used the sound typing to enhance the feeling of urgency of some of the scenes. When characters would be rushing places the key strokes would be used almost as the sounds of footsteps. I found that to a great addition to the movie.

Went to a matinee and that's what I'm comfortable having paid. I really don't think it is worth full price.