Truly Dreadful Film

To me, this movie is perfection.

There is just so much movie here. For some it may be too much. But in the same secretly sarcastic way most telemarketers say the phrase, the title of this one is particularly apt.

It’s fine. It's literally the definition of a fine movie. You’ve seen it before, you know every beat and outcome before the characters even do. Only question is how much escapism you’re looking for.

"...like the baseless fabric of this vision, the cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces, the solemn temples, the great globe itself ... shall dissolve and, like this insubstantial pageant faded, leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep." What actor or actress wouldn't give their eye teeth to deliver those lines? No other writer in the English language can conjure up such transcendently strong, evocative language. The Tempest was the last play that Shakespeare wrote entirely by himself, and it's hard to avoid the feeling that this was the master's farewell flourish. If you haven't seen this movie, it's absolutely worth it. Ignore the negative posts; I have no idea what their problem is. I rate this as among the best Shakespeare adaptations specifically for the screen, along with Zeffirelli's "Romeo and Juliet" and Branagh's "Much Ado About Nothing" and a very few others. When this movie was released there was predictably a minor flap about the central character of the old magician/sage Prospero (here, Prospera) being played by a woman. But it turns out to be no problem at all; with some extremely small adjustments to the text, everything works just fine, including the parent/child relationship (Prospera/Miranda) which is now mother/daughter. And Helen Mirren, one of our greatest living actresses, sells it. Converting Shakespeare to film carries both advantages and risks, but one advantage is an extra dimension of nuance: with effective use of close-ups the actors can act with subtle facial expressions as well as with dialog and body language. And Mirren does this very effectively indeed -- watch her face carefully in every one of her scenes. This movie also doesn't shy away from the full text; it's delivered clearly and for anyone not so familiar with Shakespeare's wording this is as good a place to start as any. Another advantage of film is the ability to use special effects, which this movie uses especially for the airy spirit Ariel (an excellent Ben Whishaw) and for the final "vision" sequence. These work well, they add to the overall feel of the play, and (avoiding the risk) they're not overdone. Compared with other Shakespeare plays the list of characters is relatively small, and although there's no doubt this is Helen Mirren's film, the rest of the cast is uniformly good. Felicity Jones is a really nice and convincing Miranda, Djimon Hounsou gives a strongly portrayed version of the conflicted Caliban, and the shipwrecked nobles (David Strathairn, Alan Cumming, Chris Cooper, Reeve Carney, Tom Conti) are uniformly good. The biggest problem area with The Tempest (as a play) is with the "fools" (the comic relief, here played by Alfred Molina and Russell Brand): relative to other plays they just aren't that funny and they seem to be just a distraction to the main story, but to their credit Molina and Brand pull off just about the best versions of them that I've seen.Kudos to director Julie Taymor for giving us this. She's someone with genuine vision and is no stranger to Shakespeare either -- see her eccentrically powerful version of Titus Andronicus ("Titus" 1999, with Anthony Hopkins) as one other example.

The Tempest (2010/I) was directed by Julie Taymor, who also wrote the screenplay. (The play was, of course, written by William Shakespeare.)There is a long tradition of women playing male roles in Shakespeare's plays. The great Sarah Bernhardt played Hamlet in the 19th Century, and at Stratford, Ontario, Seanna McKenna played Richard III. (I saw McKenna in Richard III, and she was incredible.)However, for this Tempest, Julie Taymor directs Helen Mirren as Prospera, a woman, rather than Prospero, a man. Mirren is such a superb actor that I think she could have played Prospero, but that isn't what happened. Changing the gender of the principal character in your story is a risky business. The whole concept of The Tempest is that Prospero was the Duke of Milan. He wasn't Duchess of Milan. On the island where he is marooned, Prospero is lord and master. His relationship with Miranda is one of father and daughter. It's hard to think of Prospero as a woman.Having seen The Tempest many times, I've come to expect an older male actor playing the role. (The classic Shakespearean progression is Romeo to Hamlet to Macbeth to Lear and Prospero.) So, despite Mirren's skills, I simply couldn't adjust to a woman in the part.Also, of course, the relationship between father and daughter and mother and daughter is often very different. So, changing Prospero's name to Prospera isn't just a matter of a name. It's made The Tempest into a very different story. And, in my opinion, it's definitely not the story that Shakespeare wrote.Although I have a high regard for both Helen Mirren and Julie Taymor, I think this was a concept that just didn't work. Directors and actors have always modified Shakespeare according to their thoughts about what the plays mean. You can push and stretch a Shakespearean play a long, long way, and still have it be Shakespeare. However, in this case, it's not Shakespeare, it's Taymor. It's an interesting movie, but It's not the Tempest.At the time I wrote this review, the IMDb rating for the movie was 5.4. I've never seen a serious film with this low a rating. Apparently, almost no one liked the concept. I gave the film a rating of 7.0. It's not great cinema, but it's better than a 5.4.

The Tempest is not the most riveting drama, the larger realization is after all a certain weariness with it. This is given to us as a magician who halfway through the story abandons his powers of illusion, who after conjuring to him the characters and plotting the story of revenge pauses to reflect on the emptiness of the endeavor. It's still powerful then, because we are all Prosperos alone in our island with the thoughts we conjure up to inhabit.In Shakespeare's time, the inspiration for Prospero must have likely come from the scandalous topic of John Dee, the communion with spirits and visions through crystals certainly point at that as well as more broadly the notion of a benign magic. Magic since well before Dee and up to Crowley has tried its best to mask in so much hoopla what other spiritual traditions make clear from the start: that man is an embodied consciousness with the ability to direct that consciousness to vision. Shakespeare no doubt understood this was exactly his own art, a rich and complicated magic of conjured vision in peoples' minds.So if this is to be powerful, you have to adopt a very intricate stance. Show both the power of illusion as vision and, contradictory, the emptiness of it, the fact it is underpinned by an illusory nature of reality. Greenaway masterfully did this in his Prospero film by having Prospero's creation of the play as vision, the vision lush and wonderful, and yet at every turn shown to exist on a stage.Taymor is too earnest to strike this stance, in fact judging by the cinematic fabrics here she seems unsure of what direction to follow. She is an earthy woman so intuitively builds on landscape, volcanic rock under our feet. Pasolini could soar in this approach judging from his mythic films, her approach is too usual and without awe. The magic is also too ordinary. A few movie effects cobbled together in earnest as something to woo simple souls like Trinculo. Compared to the novel richness of Greenaway this feels like discarded Harry Potter work. And the cinematic navigation is without any adventure, as if Taymor didn't believe there was anything for her to discover outside the play, to conjure up in the landscape itself by wandering to it, so she never strays in visual reflection.Mirren conveys the reflection as best she can, but that is all here, too little.

I had no choice but to watch this for a class at my college; I watched it on my own time and was supposed to write a review comparing it to the text.For being released in 2010, the CGI was just awful. It makes 70's effects look excellent. And their were so many anachronisms, and poor emotionless forced acting, Just an overall piece of rubbish. Spare yourself. This was the worst adaptation of a Shakespeare I have ever had the displeasure of watching. I found it more hilarious, more out of how soaked in cheese it was than any actual humor. It's racist on a level I cannot believe was carried over to the 21st century. Awful, awful movie. I cannot stress that enough.