#hey guys. guys. guess what. having two of your characters of colour briefly mention racism they face/have faced

[everysongineverykey]

well, i didn't think much of death on the nile 2022. what's with this trend in recent adaptations of old works trying to make the work "progressive" with some of the most halfhearted stuff i've ever seen? making white characters poc and in the process doing things like recharacterizing a formerly white, now brown financial trustee character into "a slippery snake, no one but [his cousin] trusts him" when the character's crook behavior was not at all apparent to anyone for most of the book and was only revealed towards the end, inventing queer relationships where there were none and handling all their oppressed characters with kid gloves!

this movie features hercule poirot deducing that two women are a couple out loud in front of them while they look on, terrified that he's found out their secret and might destroy them- but of course, since poirot is the main character, he can't be bigoted (never mind any old-fashioned ideals he may have possessed in the books), so all he does is use this as an opportunity to rather pointlessly wax poetic about "people killing for love" even though no one watching with half a brain ever really suspected either of them as being the killer. the problem, though, is that he says all this in front of a stranger. there's a friend of his, who the women don't know, in the room with them, listening to all this. death on the nile has their main character out a closeted queer couple to someone they don't know and don't trust in 1937. the character doesn't use it against them, of course- he's supposed to be a good guy too- but my god, imagine if you were in their shoes! you could potentially make a case for poirot knowing the man wasn't homophobic since they were friends, but that's doubtful, and it's still a really shitty thing to do. and we're just supposed to accept it as a display of how nice, how woke poirot is! i doubt this movie had a single queer person in the writers' room. death on the nile tries really really hard to make you believe it's got thought-provoking stuff in there, but ultimately it's just a shallow cash grab dressed in period clothing masquerading as the brilliant source material.