This movie does everything it can to bring Shakespeare's work to life in the new medium. The story is presented unabridged, but with cinematic flair: the production and costume design are top notch, the music compliments it excellently and the calibre of actor is unparalleled (Kenneth Branagh and Derek Jacobi in particular impressed me). And flair really is the word for this film. A sense of bombast is brought to it, which we rarely see in Shakespeare adaptations: usually these works are treated as high are which cannot be degraded through extravagence, but here we see the Earth cracking open, we have massive armies, we have extravagent fight scenes. This really brings a sense of life to the material that makes it fly by (especially for a four-hour movie).
So maybe you find it strange that it's still only an 8/10. Well, as far as I'm concerned an unabridged adaptation of a Shakespeare play can't really beat that. This film inherits the typical mishaps of his work: people behave out-of-character to contrive the necessary plot developments, vital plot elements take place off screen (including a central character's death!), the climax feels annoyingly unclimactic and so on. To make a truly excellent Shakespeare adaptation, one would have to take liberties with the plot and this film goes out of its way to alter as little as possible from the original script.
(I know some people find this kind of talk about Shakespeare unthinkable, but come on, let's stop treating him like a god; he was a writer with flaws like any other. And he wrote four hundred years ago; storytelling has come a long way since then. It's no slight against him to say that his works don't hold up perfectly hundreds of years later.)
That being said, for what it is, it is a triumph: brilliantly performed and with a great style, an epic in every sense of the word.
So maybe you find it strange that it's still only an 8/10. Well, as far as I'm concerned an unabridged adaptation of a Shakespeare play can't really beat that. This film inherits the typical mishaps of his work: people behave out-of-character to contrive the necessary plot developments, vital plot elements take place off screen (including a central character's death!), the climax feels annoyingly unclimactic and so on. To make a truly excellent Shakespeare adaptation, one would have to take liberties with the plot and this film goes out of its way to alter as little as possible from the original script.
(I know some people find this kind of talk about Shakespeare unthinkable, but come on, let's stop treating him like a god; he was a writer with flaws like any other. And he wrote four hundred years ago; storytelling has come a long way since then. It's no slight against him to say that his works don't hold up perfectly hundreds of years later.)
That being said, for what it is, it is a triumph: brilliantly performed and with a great style, an epic in every sense of the word.