The Courier

The Courier was released on Amazon Prime pretty recently, only like 3 months ago but I recently discovered it. The movie is based on a true story about Greville Wynne who was a normal salesman from England, set to be the courier in the Soviet Union by the M16 and CIA to smuggle Soviet secrets from Moscow to London with the help of Oleg Penkovsky who was the senior Soviet military intelligence officer. This movie was brilliantly directed by Dominic Cooke and surprisingly it was only his second-ever movie to direct, which is truly remarkable.

Moreover, Dominic Cooke did an incredible job in directing this film because of the way he took a true story and turned it into a movie with probably the perfect ratio of fiction/drama with a real-life aspect and accuracy, thus I think this plot and details were pretty good. Although many times, the story seemed to rush a lot, specifically in the beginning which didn’t explain the characters' backstory too well thus there was a lack of connection between the characters and audience. However, the scenes which were in like the Soviet Gulag were pretty well shot and to be honest they felt complete, like the characters background stories and all they went through was pretty complete by then and they also spent a portion of their camera time on that scene for the second half.

In addition, the characters in the film were pretty good and were represented well by their specific actors such as Rachel Brosnahan playing the CIA agent and Merab Ninidza playing Oleg Panslowski and they both really took the character and represented them wonderfully which was astonishing. However, I think Benedict Cumberbatch was a little miscast for this role as he didn’t perform as well as he has done before with other characters such as Sherlock Holmes or Alan Turing and it just felt like he was a tad bit out of form and couldn’t connect with Greville but he tried his best and gave the best performance he could.

Furthermore, this movie has one of the most aesthetically pleasing visuals I have seen so far in a film because everything from the video quality to the audio quality was top notch. This was a historic film thus getting the right set and props for a historical film is hard as historical accuracy is key and Charolette Dirickx AKA the set designer for the film really did an amazing job and specifically the scenes shot during the night looked the best in my opinion because the camera shots and lighting in those scenes was astonishing. In addition, the amazing high definition of this film makes it super satisfying and fun to watch although not many people can notice it.

To conclude, this movie had an amazing cast and one of the best and upcoming directors in the industry, in my opinion, one of the most interesting and engaging storylines although with a few sloppy edges. It also took a deep dive into the recent history and really gave us an insight into that time which was amazing as I am particularly fond of history, historical movies/series and specifically modern war history. However, the movie did have flaws such as a more sloppy timeline, bad character to audience connection and some parts just felt like they were forcibly saying it out loud. All in all, I would give this movie a solid 7.5/10.

Special thanks to Zara for helping me edit this 

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