"Elizabeth: The Golden Age". Not.
Nov. 10th, 2007 12:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rhythmaningI read mixed reviews about this film; I am surprised. I had been looking forward to it, and it had a lot going for it – an excellent cast, good performances, a good story, a great prequel – but it was relentlessly bad. The worst film I have seen in a long, long time.
It really, really didn’t work. I think there are a lot of reasons for this, not least an inability to trust the audience to concentrate for more than thirty seconds. No scene exceeded this, the editing cutting from one place to another, with no build up of tension, no character development, no real understanding of why events moved as they did.
It looked beautiful – the lighting was superb, the costumes and sets lavish. But it was also cack-handed: whenever Elizabeth was in a church, she would be bathed in light – yes, God was on her side. I got the message the first time; and the second … by the tenth scene, it was tedious.
Cate Blanchett gave a great performance – a bit hammy, I suppose, playing the hard-nosed virgin queen, looking for love (flirting with her ladies-in-waiting, one of whom, Bess, was waiting for Clive Owew’s Walter Raleigh: she shared object of the queen’s affection as well as her name – yes I think we got that, too).
But what did they do to Mary Queen of Scots? Imprisoned in Fotheringhay Catle (annoyingly, the filmmakers used the famous, instantly recognisable Eileen Donan as the location: so Fotheringhay is in Northamptonshire – kind of flat – and Eileen Donan is in the middle of a loch in the Scottish Highlands: and since every scene with Mary was preceded with a shot of Eileen Donan – just to make sure we knew where we were [or weren’t] - bang went my suspension of disbelief). The normally wonderful Samantha Morton turned this French queen (Mary de Guise) into a Glaswegian, with no gravitas; Susan Lynch, as Mary’s lady-in-waiting, just stood there gurning and sobbing.
The script was laughable – I laughed several times (and I don’t think I was meant to). Fortunately, I can’t remember any of the guilty lines.
The Spanish were clichéd, and you could almost here the director urging audiences to boo and hiss. (I did like the fact that they made King Philip bow legged.) The computer generated Armada was fairly impressive – although Francis Drake appeared in the film from nowhere – suddenly he was planning to fight the Armada with Raleigh (who, of course, single-handedly beat the Spanish invaders).
I can only think that in fact there were three of four films shot, and then edited down to make one, fast moving epic. There could be the swash-buckling battle with the Armada, the royal romance with Raleigh, the Catholic plotting with Mary. Instead, they crammed everything into one, and failed dramatically.
It really, really didn’t work. I think there are a lot of reasons for this, not least an inability to trust the audience to concentrate for more than thirty seconds. No scene exceeded this, the editing cutting from one place to another, with no build up of tension, no character development, no real understanding of why events moved as they did.
It looked beautiful – the lighting was superb, the costumes and sets lavish. But it was also cack-handed: whenever Elizabeth was in a church, she would be bathed in light – yes, God was on her side. I got the message the first time; and the second … by the tenth scene, it was tedious.
Cate Blanchett gave a great performance – a bit hammy, I suppose, playing the hard-nosed virgin queen, looking for love (flirting with her ladies-in-waiting, one of whom, Bess, was waiting for Clive Owew’s Walter Raleigh: she shared object of the queen’s affection as well as her name – yes I think we got that, too).
But what did they do to Mary Queen of Scots? Imprisoned in Fotheringhay Catle (annoyingly, the filmmakers used the famous, instantly recognisable Eileen Donan as the location: so Fotheringhay is in Northamptonshire – kind of flat – and Eileen Donan is in the middle of a loch in the Scottish Highlands: and since every scene with Mary was preceded with a shot of Eileen Donan – just to make sure we knew where we were [or weren’t] - bang went my suspension of disbelief). The normally wonderful Samantha Morton turned this French queen (Mary de Guise) into a Glaswegian, with no gravitas; Susan Lynch, as Mary’s lady-in-waiting, just stood there gurning and sobbing.
The script was laughable – I laughed several times (and I don’t think I was meant to). Fortunately, I can’t remember any of the guilty lines.
The Spanish were clichéd, and you could almost here the director urging audiences to boo and hiss. (I did like the fact that they made King Philip bow legged.) The computer generated Armada was fairly impressive – although Francis Drake appeared in the film from nowhere – suddenly he was planning to fight the Armada with Raleigh (who, of course, single-handedly beat the Spanish invaders).
I can only think that in fact there were three of four films shot, and then edited down to make one, fast moving epic. There could be the swash-buckling battle with the Armada, the royal romance with Raleigh, the Catholic plotting with Mary. Instead, they crammed everything into one, and failed dramatically.