A most peculiar and remarkable element ... because it doesn't behave as it should.
"We all thought atoms were finite and stable. Well, it turns out some of them are not. And in their instability, they admit rays. I have called this ... radioactivity."
— Marie Curie on her discovery of radium and polonium
Radioactive is a 2020 biopic about the Polish-French scientist Marie Curie. It is based on a 2010 graphic novel by Lauren Redniss and directed by Marjane Satrapi, creator of Persepolis. It stars Rosamund Pike in the titular role.
The story spans a broad period of Curie's life, from her ejection from her first lab in Paris to her eventual death, centering on her relationship with her husband and collaborator Pierre Curie, with whom she shares her first Nobel Prize. Interspersed with her story, the film contains flash-forwards to various scenes showing the applications and consequences of radioactivity, including the Atomic Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, radiation therapy for cancer, and the Chernobyl nuclear disaster.
The film is highly stylized, reflecting its comic book roots. It explores themes of legacy, rebellion, romance, and the double-edged nature of scientific discovery.
See also Madame Curie, a 1943 film which covers the same events.
This film provides examples of:
- Actor IS the Title Character: One of the release posters says, "Rosamund Pike is Marie Curie."
- Artistic License – History:
- In the film, Marie and Pierre have a classic Meet Cute, with her literally running into him on the streets of Paris and him noticing notices what she's reading. In reality, Marie and Pierre were introduced by each other by a Polish professor of physics, Józef Wierusz-Kowalski, because he knew Marie was looking for laboratory space and thought Pierre would be able to provide it.
- Marie originally refused Pierre's first offer of marriage, as she hoped to go back to Poland and get a place at the Krakow University, but when she was denied that and had to pursue her work in Paris, she agreed to the marriage. Nothing of this appears in the film.
- The film portrays Pierre going alone to Stockholm to accept the Nobel prize, only to return and find a furious Marie berating him for treating her as just a wife, which serves as shorthand to convey the ways he permitted and contributed to her erasure from the project. In real life, this conflict never happened; Pierre refused to accept the prize for physics unless Marie was included as an equal partner, which she was, and consequently both of them were required to attend the ceremony, although they were unable to do so due to their busy schedule and Marie's increasing illness. They eventually did two years later, being pressed on the fact that winners had to deliver a lecture.
- The film shows Curie donating her Nobel medals in order to fund the project after cajoling from Irene. In fact, Curie attempted to donate her medals almost immediately after the war began, but the French National Bank refused to accept them, so she instead bought war bonds using her prize money.
- Curie herself never truly acknowledged the dangers of radiation as she does at the end of the film, this being a comparatively modern field of physics.
- Aside from the historical photo in the closing credits, which shows Marie at the 1927 Solvay Conference in Brussels with Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, Erwin Schrödinger and all the other physics luminaries, the film doesn't show Marie as a respected equal member of the international community all along, rather making it look like she was supported solely by her husband and daughters and that only over time her work was reevaluated.
- Artistic License – Nuclear Physics:
- The radium shown in the film glows much brighter than it does in real life.
- The Chernobyl scene is... interesting. The fire above the building is shown as some sort of raging violet inferno, and when one of the firemen accidentally wanders into the reactor hall itself, the core is shown as a hexagonal pit in the floor gushing blue flame, apparently surrounded by intact control rod caps. (In Real Life, the caps are found on the reactor lid, which was circular and blown off by the initial explosion, obliterating the reactor hall.)
- Biopic: The film focuses on Curie's romance with her husband, but it does try to touch on a variety of other meaningful events in her life.
- Breaking the Glass Ceiling: One of the central tensions of the film is Curie's efforts to be taken seriously as a scientist despite the establishment's dismissal of women. One of the photos in the epilogue shows Curie at a conference surrounded by other scientists—all male.Irene: It must have been so difficult, being a woman and doing what you did.
- Caged Bird Metaphor: The scene on the ground in Hiroshima begins with a shot of a cage of songbirds—trapped and doomed, just like the people in the city.
- Cure for Cancer: Marie is elated when a doctor applies radium to a cancerous mole and reports shrinkage, and she and Pierre discuss breathlessly the prospect of having found a cure to the disease. In her Dying Dream at the end, she is gratified to see radiation, if not radium, being used as a cancer treatment.
- Face on the Cover: The theatrical release poster shows Curie holding up a vial of glowing radium before her face, looking directly out at the viewer.
- How We Got Here: The film begins with Curie collapsing in her lab and being rushed to the hospital. Then it flashes back to the start of her career and continues from there.
- Meet Cute: Marie and Pierre first meet when they bump into each other on the street. She drops her biology book; he picks it up and returns it to her, asking if she's interested in that kind of thing.
- One-Word Title: Radioactive pretty much says it all.
- Phlebotinum du Jour: Discussed. The Curies' discovery of radium leads to a public fascination with the stuff and many spurious claims of its ability to cure everything from depression to baldness.
- The Power of Legacy: One of the film's major themes. Curie is emphatic that her discovery of radiation will make the world a better place in the long run, and even after seeing its many victims in her Dying Dream, she concludes that the overall impact will be positive.
- The Queen's Latin: The film takes place primarily in Paris, but all the actors speak English with British accents.
- Real-Person Epilogue: The film concludes with some further details about Curie's contributions to the study of radiation and medicine and reveals the discoveries her daughter Irene would go on to make.
- Replacement Goldfish: After Pierre's death, Curie begins sleeping with their assistant, who strongly resembles Pierre. In one scene she imagines for a moment that he is Pierre as she watches him sleep.
- Science Hero: Curie is portrayed as a brilliant and driven analyst with a strong commitment to scientific ideals.
- Spooky Séance: Pierre convinces Marie to attend a seance with him, conducted by an eminent spiritualist. Marie is skeptical, and then slightly outraged to discover that the medium is exploiting their discoveries about radiation to imitate supernatural phenomena. She becomes a regular attendee, however.
- Technicolor Fire: In the Chernobyl scene, the fire above the open reactor is bright purple.
- Widow's Weeds: After her husband dies, Curie dresses almost exclusively in black.
