Sorry, this movie sucks

This movie was so-so. It had it's moments, but wasn't the greatest.

A movie that not only functions as a solid scarefest but a razor-sharp satire.

It is a whirlwind of delight --- attractive actors, stunning couture, spectacular sets and outrageous parties.

Macbeth... a member of the one percent who got it all though his actions as a violent, unrelenting and un-apologetic warrior.... an accomplished killer. However, once he murdered the king and assumed the throne, he discovered that he did not know how to govern. His inability to shoulder the true trappings and responsibilities of power led to his destruction. In light of the threats to today's - July 2017 - governmental horrors.... does this sound familiar????

What seemed to work in Richard III, placing Richard as a Totalitarian Dictator of the modern era, for this production of Macbeth placing Macbeth as European Dictator, just ends up being a mannered play. The pyrotechnics of the performers ends up drowning out the simplicity and directness of Shakespeare's message: the guilt of conscience placing limits on blind ambition. The Shakespeare script was memorable but something was lost in the over-dramatization. This is one of my favorite of Shakespeare's plays--one of the first I studied in high school. This performance will not stand the test of time in the same way that Ian McClellan's Richard III will.There are really two different and distinct ideas Shakespeare presented. In Richard III--the play was about ruthless ambition, and ambition realized with ruthless, cold, calculating murder. Macbeth is about ruthless ambition AND conscience made palpable.

This filming of Goold's production of Macbeth makes no bones (or blood, or torn entrails) about its roots in extreme violence. This is a Macbeth that is, at times, as much SAW or The Ring as it is the wordplay. This is not, in my view, a bad thing: Stewart is one of the few actors who can stand up against this kind of visceral attack and not be overwhelmed. I found the witches, in their surgical masks and wielding autopsy saws, to be truly nasty spectres; they're continually lurking around in the background of the play, with their scenes integrated skillfully into the rest of the action. The sound design is enormous, as of the bombardment of Stalingrad, and at times again threatens to become over-whelming; the atmosphere is of a world already dead, already blasted into dust. Kate Fleetwood's Lady Macbeth is so frightfully evil, with her terrifying bone-structure and icy manner, that she sometimes threatens to become the centre of the play's evil.This is a combination of Shakespeare, 1984, torture-porn and Eisenstein: a big, brutal, blasting Macbeth for a very modern audience. I cannot imagine the schoolboy who would not be enthralled, though it might repel the older audience member.PS: regarding the earlier reviewer: Macbeth does NOT 'admonish' his wife with the phrase about 'bring forth men children only': it is the ultimate COMPLIMENT in a male dominated society as he goes on to prove with the words 'for thy UNDAUNTED mettle should compose nothing but men'. The Macbeths are NOT young: he is a mature man: they have had children 'I have given suck' and their child is dead or gone; that is plain. If the scene has any contradictions, it's that, being past their chances of parenthood 'he has no children', he should hint that she will be fertile again. This production solves that problem neatly by providing a significant age difference between the two leads: Macbeth the older man and the Lady nearing the end of her fertility.

The richness of Shakespeare's plays, and the vagueness of their settings, lends them to many adaptations and interpretations. This version of Macbeth, the "Scottish play", doesn't feel particularly Scottish, more Orwellian, and Patrick Stewart plays the central character less as an opportunistic chancer out of his depth, and more as a deranged psychopathic tyrant: if the film resembles any other, it's 'Downfall', the story of the last days of Hitler. As always when watching Shakespeare, one is stunned by the sheer number of brilliant phrasings that have entered general usage from his works. But Macbeth is an odd play dramatically: the main action occurs offstage, the leavening self-referential humour present in 'Hamlet' is here lacking, and there are few appealing characters. In Kenneth Brannagh's version of 'Hamlet', for example, I really enjoyed Derek Jacobi's ambiguous Claudius; but in this story, there is little other than war and death. As a film, it also falls between two stools, as it is shot neither naturalistically, nor with the brilliant invention of Baz Luhrmann's 'Romeo + Juliet'; rather, it feels like a stage play jazzed up with the occasional camera trick. So I'm not sure this is the best of Shakespeare's tragedies, nor that this is my favourite production; but it's certainly intense. Indeed, if this was once popular entertainment, one can only regret the undemanding nature of modern tastes.