Don't you love it when suddenly an actor becomes famous as a marketing selling name, companies and distributors dig up their old works and re-release them?
A year before becoming possibly the best James Bond, Daniel Craig starred in the BBC TV picture adaptation of Robert Harris' mystery book about a western historian researching the opened-up Russian archives when he comes upon possibly Joseph Stalin's diaries...only to discover something more dreadful is on the arise...
Never read the book, but since I enjoyed Harris' FATHERLAND and ENIGMA novels, I'm sure ARCHANGEL was a good read.
BBC movies, like HBO, has great street cred for producing small movies that look and sometimes are as good as movies sent out to theatres. In this case, its like the digital cameras that hack direct-to-DVD horror productions are using were (again) shot on the cheap, and we get one giant underwhelming movie.
Really, your cinema history fails when it begins good, churns along allright, but by the 2nd half, you continuously lose interest and care of the mystery itself because of how weepy the filmmakers make it. Despite that, I was willing to give the movie a "watchable but forgettable as hlel" rating until the ending....
...when the opening quote is re-prised, and you immediately want to throw your shoe at the TV screen. Really, the only people that do such amatuerness are people who are unsecure of their own talents, and of the audience.
