

He’s attracted to Vera from the moment he spots a flash of her thigh on the train to the island. Unlike everyone else, he’s suspicious of Justice Wargrave. A born predator, he realizes almost at once that they’re being hunted. He’s more action-oriented than I’ve seen in other adaptations. He still murdered (at least) 21 people but this time over diamonds rather than leaving his African soldiers to die in the bush while he saved his skin. Edward Armstrong (Toby Stephens) and General MacArthur (Sam Neill).Lombard got a bit of rewriting from the novel. It’s great to learn that our hero (Philip Lombard) and our heroine (Vera Claythorne) not only fall in love and escape with their lives, but they aren’t murderers. The vast majority of adaptations follow the play’s ending. But she utilized every minute of those three hours and rewrites to make the closest version yet of the novel. She had three hours to give us backstory and humanize the island’s visitors. Yes, she altered details to make the film more cinematic and less novelistic. No, scriptwriter Sarah Phelps did not use Agatha’s dialog.
And then there were none emily brent movie#
It’s an odd fault in a movie that was carefully scripted, designed, cast, and shot to follow Agatha’s novel almost to the letter. They might as well be futuristic alien ants. Nothing individualistic about any of them. They all looked the same to me amorphous, blocky, vaguely humanoid green glass. However, the camera pans over them so fast that if they vary in how they look, to line up with their corresponding character, I couldn’t tell.

Each one supposedly represents one of the ten deserving victims of U. Those modernistic pieces of glass that get shattered, one by one, are apparently each unique. The poem at its center has morphed into “Ten Little Soldiers.” Thus, the default name for Agatha’s seminal novel has become And Then There Were None. We can’t use the replacement title either because it’s also becoming problematic. My big quibble is the soldier statuettes.īecause we’re so enlightened these days, we can’t use Agatha’s original title (look it up). Read more of Teresa’s Agatha Christie movie reviews at Peschel Press.Īlso, follow Teresa’s discussion of these movies on her podcast. Gorgeously cast, scripted, shot, acted, and set designed. This is the novel: gruesome, paranoid, atmospheric, horrifying, and, as God is my witness, the unlucky visitors earned their fates. The typical adaptation sticks with the play’s ending. Teresa reviews “And Then There Were None” (2015) and thought Sarah Phelps version killed it.
