Based on one of William Shakespeare’s most famous plays,
1948’s Hamlet was Directed by and
starred Laurence Olivier. The film became somewhat of a Marmite film, winning
four Oscars including Best Picture but being criticized by some for leaving out
vital aspects and characters from Shakespeare’s text. I had never seen a
production of Hamlet until today but
despite being forced to read Shakespeare at school in the most uninspiring ways
possible, I’ve thoroughly enjoyed the several plays I’ve seen as an adult. I am
in no way an expert on the bard but what I’ve seen, I’ve loved. It’s with a
heavy heart then that I have to report that I did not enjoy Olivier’s
interpretation of Hamlet and found it
to be one of the dullest movie watching experiences of my year so far.
I’d class Hamlet
as a good film which I did not enjoy, much as The Expendables is a bad film which I did enjoy. One of the
difficulties when one is watching a Shakespeare play or film is the language
barrier. Written in four hundred year old English, the words and phrases are very
different to my modern mother tongue and it can be difficult to extract the
meaning from the text. I’ve never really struggled before with the likes of Richard III, Romeo and Juliet, Coriolanus
and Much Ado About Nothing but here
much of the language washed over me. I think this was because of two things.
Firstly I wasn’t interested and secondly the actor’s voices reverberated around
the sound stage causing echoes which bumped into the following words.
