This is a an interpretation of the Agatha Christie's mystery, which was published in 1937. The publishing decade, if not the exact year, turned out to be important, as some of the main issues of the movie are instances of the director trying to force current cultural values in to a book from the thirties. One wonders *why* he did this, whether it was because he didn't trust his audience and thought people would call him a racist if he depicted the flavor of the original book, or whether he might have actually believed he was improving on the book by pouring new wine in an old wine skin. Who knows? In any event, the results of his heavy-handed cultural fusion were awful. For example, two of the protagonists were shown "dancing" in a club in the beginning, and it was such a raunchy, kama sutraish display I can't believe people today would be allow it, much less people in the 1930's, but there it was, and it served early on to separate the audience from any "believability" that they were watching something supposedly taking place in the thirties. It was the same with the jazz singer's niece. Her backstory is that of a poor black neice of a musician in the US who just happened to go to the same *finishing school* as a rich white British heiress! In the 1930's? It would have been nice if the director tried to give the audience *some* credit, but the movie decided instead to be condescending, and when the movie decided to be condescending it was SO condescending it was astounding.

One might wonder why I started with that rather than the plot, etc., and the reason is that it was so jarringly out of sync with what one might envision as 1930's "reality" that you don't get invested in believing you are watching a real event - you don't become involved in the film, and if you don't believe in what you are seeing is "real", you don't care about it. IOW, the wokeness killed what could have been a good movie.

Anyway, a highlight from the show is the scenery. From some overhead shots along the Nile showing a lush green river valley surrounded on either side by miles of sand and hard desert to the temples it makes you want to go to Egypt. Oh, they also had an obligatory pyramid shot, and you can't help but be impressed by the sheer size of these monstrosities! How many heavy stones did it take to build these, all with manual labor *in the heat of the desert*? How many people died during construction? How many years of grief and toil to build these? Somehow I briefly felt the enormity of a primitive people undertaking such a colossal project during the film, and that alone is probably worth the price of admission.

LOL, the pyramid scene was ALSO a source of frustration for me, though. In the previous scenes Christie's detective Poirot is in a club in England where jazz is playing and he will be tasting desserts in said club, and asks the waiter for one of each they have. When they arrive he says, "no, there are seven of them" and makes a big production of getting rid of one of them so he has an even number of desserts to try. So you figure, o.k., the man has Asperger's or something and you're waiting to see where they are going with that, only to see him in the next scene sitting in front of the pyramid with a plate containing... ONE cupcake! Hello??? One is an *odd* number, and Poirot just told us himself he doesn't eat things in odd numbers, so WHY when setting out his own dessert would he put out an odd number of them? The thing about a mystery is you are supposed to have to keep track of the little details to solve it, in that is what lets the detective figure things out while everyone else out there is going around accidentally destroying important clues. This scene was kind of a tip not to bother doing so, and a foreshadowing that when the movie DID decide to give you a clue, it would be blindingly obvious.

So as far as plot goes, we know there's going to be a murder, and everyone is supposed to be a suspect to some degree, and I'm sure that's the way it is in Christie's book, but in the movie? Given the way they portrayed the characters, you KNOW who the killer is going to end up being from the first scene of the movie in the jazz club! You just watch the movie to see how it plays out.

The boats they used were *beautiful*! I'd love one of the open boats they were putting around in, and the glass-walled river cruiser similarly looked like a fancy 30's party- boat. Well done, movie's boatchooser!

One thing that was kind of funny was when they were going down the Nile on the party boat. It was a good plot idea as it isolated them from anyone else. The thing is though, every night they would let the crew off which I presume was so we'd know the crew wasn't involved or have them be witnesses, but... where did they go? They were out in the middle on Nowhere, Egypt! Were they just camping in the sand every night? It made no sense. Similarly, when Jackie (the supposed jilted ex who follows Linnet and her new husband and her former lover Simon around the world) shows up, she gets on the boat at one of the temples they are visiting after steaming down the river, and the captain said he had to let her on as she already had a ticket. The thing is though, LOL, this temple was out in the middle of *nowhere*, there were no roads going to it, it was surrounded by desert, with just the river for access. How did she get there? OTOH, probably the real reason for the scene was to make sure everyone in the theater was really sure they were the killers before the acutal killing, as since Simon initially stated he rented the entire boat out for his honeymoon party, the only way she could have gotten a ticket was if she got it from Simon. Then you just think, "why would the director want to give up the whole suspense of the movie?", and then you just say, "meh, whatever". One question it does raise though, is WHY put the scene in at all? IOW, if we as an audience can see something clearly, there's no doubt Poirot would see it as well, and it makes one wonder why he'd leave Linnet on her own when she told him she was worried someone was going to kill her. Poirot could have publicly faced down the murderers *before* they committed murder at this point but didn't, so... is Poirot in part responsible for the murders that occurred? Maybe.

Ah, one more thing that bothered me. At the end of the movie when the remaining guests are getting off the boat, Linnet's crooked business manager has to say, "well, of course I was afraid, someone of my color wouldn't get a fair shake here" or something like that. The thing is though, the British gave back Egypt to the Egyptians in the 1920's, so at the time the movie supposedly took place it had been over 10 years since Egypt's courts and Egypt itself was ruled by Egyptians who looked *just like him*! What was he afraid of? Was it really THAT important to put in a "white people bad" statement in the movie? And if the director decided it was, couldn't he at least have made it a believable one? While we're discussing racial tropes in Hollywood, there were only three guns in the movie, the killers had one, the Indian accountant had one, and the black singer had one, so what we were supposed to glean from this supposedly "woke" movie is that pretty much all killers and minorities carry guns but that white people don't? Yeah...

So overall it's a murder-mystery where the director pretty much tells you who the murderer is in the opening scene, and a movie with a ton of ham-handed decisions that someone had to make IRL to produce something like this. I can't say I'd recommend it, but the scenes of Egypt *were* exceptional, and like I said, the speedboat with the wooden deck is to die for.