The character of Hamlet is wrought with complexity and divisions. When Hamlet arrives, the apparition takes him away and demands that he put his father’s soul to rest for his “most horrible and foul murder.” Alone, he is faced with the duty of exacting revenge for his father’s death on his uncle, and the commission likely throws him into insanity. The apparition is seemingly like that of the deceased King, so the guards callto Horatio and the son of the King, Hamlet, to confirm their visions. Two guards see an apparition coming in the night. The King of Denmark has died and his brother is taking the throne and the Queen as his bride for the sake of the country. The movie begins in the middle of a story. This story involves all levels of drama, including violence, intrigue, sex, and madness. With lavish sets and lush costume design changing the setting from medieval to the 19th Century, this tale of a son’s revenge for the untimely death of his father at the hands of his father’s brother delves into humanity’s fundamental questions of: What does it take to be an honorable man? An honorable king? An honorable father? An honorable son? No other actor, producer, writer, and director has done the preeminent Bard more justice and honor than Kenneth Branagh, and he pushes this theater production to epic proportions. Recently, we have seen several renditions of his comedies and tragedies brought to the silver screen from Trevor Nunn’s THE TWELTH NIGHT to Baz Luhrmann’s modern ROMEO AND JULIETTE, but few compare to the new staging of HAMLET by Kenneth Branagh. William Shakespeare is a popular author in Hollywood. Branagh attempts to teach the lessons of Shakespeare by not leaving any thing out of the script, and even adding his own elements.
The movie is not like typical Hollywood fare, but reflects more of an enactment of a play than an entertaining picture. With a strong adherence to the script, the movie has very few instances of immoral elements, but Kenneth Branagh has added his own modern touches including lascivious sex scenes and some mildly graphic violence. When she sees her father dead at the hands of her lost lover, she goes mad and ends her life. Now, she is Hamlet's lover and is not as innocent, but still fragile. In the medieval setting, Ophelia embodied everything pure and somewhat simple however, under Branagh's direction we see her as simple but less pure. Hamlet is also taxed with a love interest of his own in Ophelia.
With lavish sets and lush costume design changing the setting from medieval to the 19th Century, Kenneth Branagh’s new film version of William Shakespeare’s HAMLET tells once more the tale of a son's revenge for the untimely death of his father at the hands of his father’s brother.
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