Movie: Murder on the Orient Express (2017)

Wow. I was so sad to have missed this in the cinemas. So, a few weeks ago, I picked up the dvd to watch when I had en evening without distractions.

That was tonight.

The cast is magnificent, the story is one of my favourites, but man do I dislike this adaptation.

We have characters who are taken from different Christie books, we have scenes which are supposed to play in a blizzard and yet characters leisurely walk about without a coat, and most annoyingly, Branagh does nothing for me as Poirot. I even had to remind myself a few times that he was supposed to be Poirot. An excellent moustache and an obsession with equally-sized eggs does not make Poirot. It’s his character, and I could see precious little of that in this adaptation.

So disappointing.

Oh, and since were at it, I am also not impressed that they have significantly changed the beginning of the story.

As we know, the story starts on a cold winter morning at the train station in Aleppo. The film starts in Jerusalem, at the Wailing Wall. Was it too politically loaded to keep to the original story and start in Aleppo? Was it too contentious to acknowledge that Aleppo at one point was a hub for western travel and pretty much part of the modern world? Was it a case of “out of sight, out of mind”?

I mean, Christie wrote the book in Aleppo, for crying out loud.