Atonement

[Sethomas]

If there's already a thread for this, I hadn't seen it!

My roomie's girlfriend insisted the three of us watch this, and I went in having only been told that it was a love and war movie. I figured it'd just be an anglophone rehashing of A Very Long Engagement, which I have yet to see in full anyways because that seems to be a very long movie.

I was quite surprised that this movie is actually good and was worth my time. I have made myself rather prejudiced against most movies in general, especially the kind that involve romance and actors whom I've been forced to hear of regardless of my disinterest in pop culture.

Usually I'm irritated by movies that use war as a plot device to convey some message about romance, which is what I thought this would be. It's not. It uses romance and war in parallel to convey a message about the human experience. In the past 3000 or so years of human story telling, only in the extremely recent past has it been considered okay to give a worthwhile story a happy ending. Hence, if something with a saccharine conclusion doesn't market itself outright as a comedy, I'll probably dislike it. This movie pays respect to that tradition and truth, that we learn much better from life's travesty and pain.

It's not a war movie and it's not a romance movie, but I thought it was very good.