‘Scoop’ (2024) Netflix Movie Review - Narrowly Conceived and Unmemorable

In Scoop, director Philip Martin throws scenes at us with so much urgency they look like breaking news. You can almost see him and his editor, Kristina Hetherington, sweating and panting to grab the eyeballs of the audience. They want to keep you hooked in the same way TV anchors hook you nowadays with noisy, empty fanfare. Some news channels scream at the top of their lungs, while some use cheap computer graphics to put their anchors in the middle of a heavy rain or a war zone. The stunt that Scoop pulls off is that it recreates an interview between Prince Andrew and Emily Maitlis, where the Duke of York is interviewed about his friendship with the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

The hand gestures, the yellow lights, and the inflections are all copied and infused with a dramatic touch to give the film an aura of thespians and research. Gillian Anderson doesn't become Maitlis; she merely relays her tone, her posture, her words like a mimicry artist. The way she asks questions and moves her left hand tells us that Anderson has carefully studied Maitlis from the outside. The whole film, like her, is merely interested in external things. Much time has been spent on costumes, makeup, and hairstyles and less on providing depth to any of the characters on the screen. Who is Sam McAlister (Billie Piper)? A single mom with a kid. What happened to her husband? Does she have any friends? Her mother is apparently okay with her daughter's hectic schedule, but what about Sam's son? Does he resent the fact that he doesn't get to spend much time with his mother? Sam looks less like a human and more like a hungry beast who never gets exhausted. She interrupts her son's story about a crush when she learns about Epstein's arrest. I was reminded of that scene from Hansal Mehta's Scoop where Jagruti Pathak leaves her family in the middle of a vacation to catch hot news.

Martin's adaptation of McAlister's book - Scoops: Behind the Scenes of the BBC's Most Shocking Interviews - is narrowly conceived and unmemorable. By showing McAlister as someone who prioritizes professional life over the personal one, by reducing Esme (Romola Garai) and Amanda (Keeley Hawes) to dispensers of kind or committed stares, the movie becomes incurious about its characters and treats them as chess pieces. Scoop's depiction of the life of the journalists is neither interesting nor fresh. It doesn't tell you anything you don't already know. Even the events before and after the interview, though shot like a tense thriller, ultimately come across as insignificant. The gist of it all is that some dedicated, honest journalists decided to question a powerful man. Scoop doesn't go any deeper than this sentence.

The movie could have benefitted from giving voice to the victims. It's their story that we should have heard. But they are reduced to a bunch of photographs. Scoop could have still worked as a drama or a thriller if it didn't look like those Netflix documentary recreations. During the end credits, you might find yourself saying, "That's it? I would have been better off watching the real interview instead." Scoop becomes obsolete as soon as it ends.

Final Score- [4.5/10]
Reviewed by - Vikas Yadav
Follow @vikasonorous on Twitter
Publisher at Midgard Times