Christian Bale Has The #1 Movie On Netflix
The new Christian Bale-led mystery thriller, The Pale Blue Eye, is currently the #1 most-streamed movie on Netflix.
You might know Christian Bale best as the actor who plays Batman in Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy, but right now he’s dominating Netflix as a completely different detective. Bale plays retired sleuth Augustus Landor in the Netflix original mystery thriller The Pale Blue Eye. The film hit the streamer on Friday, and it’s at the number one spot on the platform’s most-streamed movies list.
Based on the 2003 novel of the same name by Louis Bayard, The Pale Blue Eye finds Christian Bale’s Augustus Landor investigating the gruesome murder of a West Point cadet. It initially appears the young man hanged himself, but things start looking more like homicide than suicide when it’s discovered the victim’s heart was removed with surgical precision. Exhausted with dealing with West Point cadets and staff refusing to speak with him candidly, Landor recruits one of the school’s own: a cadet with the unforgettable name of Edgar Allan Poe.
Yes, it’s that Edgar Allan Poe, though The Pale Blue Eye‘s portrayal of Christian Bale’s Augustus character mentoring the future author is fiction. The story presents a kind of “what if” for what may have inspired Poe’s dark stories and poetry. Poe is played by Harry Melling, who may be best known as Dudley Dursley — Harry Potter‘s cruel adoptive brother — but who has since been building a reputation in films like The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, The Tragedy of Macbeth, and The Old Guard.
The Pale Blue Eye is directed and adapted to the screen by Scott Cooper, and it makes it the filmmaker’s third outing with Christian Bale. They first collaborated on the 2013 crime drama Out of the Furnace — Cooper’s second feature directorial effort after 2009’s Oscar-winning Crazy Heart — and once again on the 2017 western Hostiles.
Scott Cooper is an interesting filmmaker in terms of his critical reception vs. the talent he attracts. Most of his films rate along the lines of The Pale Blue Eye when it comes to reviewers, which currently has a 66 percent critics rating on Rotten Tomatoes: not horrible, but not great either. You’ll find comparable scores for Cooper-helmed projects like Black Mass, Hostiles, and Antlers; and yet, critics be damned, the guy manages to attract the best talent out there and Christian Bale is just the start of the list.
For example, while Christian Bale’s first outing with Cooper, Out of the Furnace, was torn apart by critics, it netted an incredible cast with the likes of Casey Affleck, Forest Whitaker, Willem Dafoe, Woody Harrelson, and Zoe Saldana. Likewise, Bale is joined in The Pale Blue Eye by Gillian Anderson, Robert Duvall, Toby Jones, and more.
It’s no small feat for the new Christian Bale-led thriller to take the top spot. The Pale Blue Eye‘s competition includes Peter Jackson’s King Kong and the 2011 blockbuster Transformers: Dark of the Moon. Not to mention that getting number one meant facing down the other big whodunnit to drop on Netflix recently: Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery.
If you’re a Netflix subscriber, you can see what all the fuss is about right now and check out Christian Bale in The Pale Blue Eye.
