Directed by Robert Zemeckis who is best known for the 1994 Academy Award-winning film Forrest Gump, Allied takes an unusual twist on the World War II-set Hollywood blockbuster by making it a predominantly romantic movie. The film starts in Nazi-controlled French Morocco in 1942 where we meet a Canadian intelligence officer, played by Brad Pitt, who is on a secret mission to assassinate a high-ranking German official. As part of his cover, he works closely with a beautiful French Resistance fighter, played by the Oscar-winning French actress Marion Cotillard. Eventually, they fall in love and get married after moving to London several months after their operation. Besides the constant bombardment of London from German bombers, the couple leads a rather normal life and even become parents to a daughter amidst an air raid. However, things begin to go awry after Pitt’s character is informed by his British military intelligence boss that his beloved wife may in fact be a Nazi spy. Extremely wary of what he is told about the woman he loves, he breaks protocol and decides to take matters into his own hands by personally uncovering the truth. Over the course of the movie, there are several thrilling scenes resembling a traditional war film, especially during their mission and the bombing of London, but, at its heart, it is a love story. Although with much higher stakes, it is essentially about times when one’s relationships are tested and who can one really trust when several allegiances overlap. Undoubtedly two good-looking people who are international superstars, Brad Pitt and Marion Cotillard lend the film a certain quality of sexiness, which makes their on-screen chemistry even more appealing. Overall, I found it to be an enjoyable cinematic experience that was surprisingly more of a romance than I expected from a movie about German spies at the height of World War II.
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