When Marjane Satrapi co-directed the feature film version of her graphic novel Persepolis in 2007, it seemed like the beginning of a unique, promising filmmaking career. But Satrapi’s subsequent films have largely been disappointments, and she abandons nearly all of her distinctive style for the rote biopic Radioactive, about the life of pioneering scientist Marie Curie. Radioactive is itself based on a graphic novel (by Lauren Redniss), and it features occasional creative visual flourishes that take it beyond its dramatization-of-Wikipedia feel. But most of the movie is a plodding recreation of historical events, with blunt expository dialogue and characters who exist to spout important facts.

The movie opens in 1934 as Marie (Rosamund Pike) is rushed to the hospital, the consequence of a lifetime of working with radioactive materials. “This is Madame Curie,” a doctor at the hospital helpfully points out, in case viewers aren’t aware of which major historical figure’s biography they’re going to learn about. Pike is introduced covered in unconvincing old-age makeup in the manner of far too many biopics, but the older Marie barely has any screen time before the movie flashes back to 1893, when Marie, then a young woman, first arrived in Paris to study physics and chemistry.

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The screenplay by veteran British TV writer Jack Thorne follows a mostly linear structure from there, as Marie experiences resistance from the all-male board at the Sorbonne and struggles to find a place to conduct her experiments. She’s saved by fellow scientist Pierre Curie (Sam Riley), who’s intrigued by her work and by her personality, and offers her space in his own lab to continue her study of the properties of uranium.

Marie and Pierre soon team up both professionally and romantically, working together to make the groundbreaking discovery of two new elements and the existence of what Marie dubs radioactivity. “Curies discover radioactivity,” reads a newspaper headline in a montage of clippings about the duo’s rise to prominence, and that bland declaration is only slightly less exciting than the dramatization of the events it describes.

“I guess everything changes now, doesn’t it?” the Curies’ fellow scientist Paul Langevin (Aneurin Barnard) asks, bluntly pointing out the obvious as the Curies become international celebrities. While Marie faces opposition and skepticism from the scientific community because of her gender, Thorne and Satrapi often reduce her character to a dependence on Pierre, who soon develops the clichéd movie cough of doom, complete with blood in a handkerchief. As the Curies marvel at the range of radioactive consumer products that come on the market and casually handle radioactive materials (even keeping a glowing vial with them in bed), it’s only a matter of time before they discover what the audience already knows: radiation cause severe damage to the human body.

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The film’s major structural deviation comes in the second half, with occasional flash-forwards to the ways radiation has changed the world, most of them negative. Although these scenes start with a young cancer patient receiving potentially life-saving radiation therapy in the 1950s, the rest of them depict the horrors of radiation: the atomic bomb dropping on Hiroshima in 1945, nuclear testing in the Nevada desert in 1961, the meltdown of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in 1986. Even though neither of the Curies lived to see any of this, the movie seems to blame them for the consequences of their discoveries.

The idea of placing Marie in an impressionistic history of radiation, as hinted at by the title, could be an interesting way to subvert the biopic formula, but Satrapi only fully embraces it at the very end, as a dying Marie wanders through future history, seeing how radiation has changed the world. Otherwise, the story remains linear, and once Pierre dies, the movie loses its focus. The filmmakers devote substantial screen time to Marie’s affair with the married Paul following Pierre’s death, playing up her celebrity tabloid treatment in a way that detracts from her scientific achievements. Later, the movie jumps ahead to Marie’s time working with her now-grown daughter Irene (Anya Taylor-Joy) to bring mobile X-ray units to the World War I battlefield.

It’s both too much and not enough, creating a superficial portrait of one of the most important figures in scientific history, whose life has already been dramatized in several other biopics going back to 1943. Pike brings some raw emotion and passion to the role, especially during Marie’s long period of mourning following Pierre’s death, but Thorne’s screenplay treats Marie more as a symbol than a person, even when her romantic life is being torn apart by unscrupulous journalists.

Pike gave a similarly driven performance in another rote biopic as journalist Marie Colvin in 2018’s A Private War, and the combination of her screen presence and Marie’s inherent historical significance sometimes brings resonance to Radioactive. But overall, the movie feels like a missed opportunity for Satrapi to add innovation to the biopic formula, to draw on her graphic novel background (and Redniss’ work) to create an artistic, fluid take on historical drama. As Marie uncovers some of the fundamental secrets of how the universe is constructed, the movie itself has no sense of discovery.

Starring Rosamund Pike, Sam Riley, Aneurin Barnard, Simon Russell Beale and Anya Taylor-Joy, Radioactive premieres Friday, July 24 on Amazon Prime.

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