preview

Branagh's Hamlet

Good Essays
Hamlet, one of the most intricate and influential plays by Shakespeare, debatably of all time. It has inspired not only appreciative readers and writing critiques but continuous generations of people. The inspiration led to the fabrication of many great movies, which wasn’t achievable until the 20th century. Before cinema was the prevalent method of sharing appreciation and spilling emotion for a specific subject, art portrayed what would fly through our minds such as the many interpretations of Ophelia’s death. With the imagery put into motion we can try and pick apart how certain people might view the play being portrayed and choose what best suits our expectation of this tragedy. Other things that only film has been able to present to…show more content…
The film that surpassed all my expectations and gave me exactly what I wanted to see was Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet. The way I would picture King Hamlets great castle of Denmark came up exactly the way I thought it would. The 1800’s setting presented in this film gave it more of a professional feel to it and I loved the vibrant colours throughout the movie. So even though the play is suppose to give off a gloomy atmosphere, dealing with the concept of suicide, the vibrancy of every scene would grab your attention away from the themes for a few seconds. It lets you take in the beautiful scenery and how the play should’ve been set up if it did take place in the real world. Scenes such as the burial of Ophelia, where the imagery and setting change from the graveyard to Hamlets old memories of Yorick, the contrasts between such vibrant scenes and darker ones mix and interlace beautifully. This is something that neither Zeffirelli nor Almereyda were able to accomplish in their films. In Zaferelli’s Hamlet the imagery presented throughout was not more than what the settings it could not portray. It didn’t properly grasp more than the generic medieval atmosphere. It would’ve been a lot more successful to include more clips of what life would’ve been like for Hamlet and the people of Denmark. In Almereyda’s version it wasn’t really his fault for not presenting more imagery of the play because it was set in modern times, and we have seen countless movies and clips of
Get Access