On New Year’s Eve, my brother and I went over my parents’ house. Not being college football fans, we decided to watch a movie. (Although, we did see the end of the Ohio/Georgia game and it was really exciting.) We had some trouble picking a movie. We had seen everything we were really interested in, so we were looking through whatever we hadn’t seen. We settled on Death on the Nile. My parents and I had seen Murder on the Orient Express and thought it was decent. Why not try another Agatha Christie? The cast was loaded and, though none of us have read it, it’s a classic book.
Turns out, the movie was pretty bad. Now, I don’t like bad movies because, well, you know, they’re bad. I know there are some people who like bad movies, they watch them ironically or something, but that’s not for me. I never knowingly watch a bad movie; it just happens sometimes. The thing is, because of the company, I enjoyed myself.
Death on the Nile, which should have been called Five Deaths on the Nile, had problems on several levels. It was slow. The first murder didn’t happen for over an hour. Poirot, the main character, came off as unjustifiably arrogant and unsympathetic. There were several sloppy anachronisms. It had songs that weren’t released until after the movie takes place in 1937 and, strangely, a wireless electric guitar.
To its credit, the movie did give us a lot to talk about. We spent the two hours looking things up that seemed funny. Talking about our confusion. And wondering what the book must be like. I’m glad we were watching at home. None of those conversations would have been possible in a movie theater.
Death on the Nile certainly wasn’t the worst movie I’ve seen. It was much more enjoyable than Knives Out, to pick another murder mystery. But it definitely wasn’t a good movie. The last question the four of us have is whose fault it was, Agatha Christie’s or the filmmakers’. My mom is thinking of reading the book just to find out. I’ll be curious to hear what she says.
