Oh dear! I bought this for Teresa, for 50p, from a local charity shop. She likes her period dramas. And, if they’re good, so do I. This was pretty dreadful.
I could tell it was going to be duff right from the opening sequence, in which some stained glass is rendered in a very modern way, finishing in a portrait of Elizabeth I as a very easily recognisable Cate Blanchett.
Unlike the Catholic Church, who were upset by the way they’re villainised in this film – and they are a set of sallow faced pantomime devils, no mistake! – what offends me is the way that modern filmmakers seem obsessed with rendering history as soap opera.
Clive Owen’s Walter Raleigh is a smugly self-satisfied himbo, and Cate Blanchett’s Queenie and her coterie of giggling ladies are about as Renaissance as cellphone selfies.
The music is sub LOTR. Kind of what one might expect from scene-setting sounds in a made for TV fantasy series with delusions of grandeur.
Rhys Ifan’s villainous Robert Reston is, whilst allegedly based loosely on Robert Ballard, pure fiction. Indeed, the whole film is a ludicrous patchwork of fictions. More like a fantasy film than a historic epic.
Art critic Kenneth Clark observes that a great leap forward was made when Renaissance artists realised that they needed to depict other ages not as reflections of their own times, but as they might actually have been. We appear to have stepped backwards in time, in this respect.
Like so much modern media, it’s all about surfaces. As a Cambridge local, member of the National Trust, and someone who likes visiting beautiful old buildings, it was fun to identify numerous locations as they appeared (the River Cam and The Backs standing in for The Thames, and Ely Cathedral’s Lady Chapel all dressed up, etc.). It is visually sumptuous, but that actually becomes annoying when there’s no real substance underneath.
The idea that some viewers might watch this garbage and take it for a historical account is more than mildly worrisome. It also panders to the very strong and growing tendency here in England these days to airbrush royalty, be it ancient or modern, into some chocolate box idea of ‘real’ nobility.
Not sure if I saw the earlier Elizabeth movie, by the same director. But watching this does not incline me to make sure I have. Nor would it surprise me to learn I had actually seen it. And then forgotten it completely. If it’s anything like this, forgetting I’d seen it would be a blessing.
I remember seeing trailers for Elizabeth, The Golden Age, at cinemas around the time it came out. I half thought I’d like to see it, in particular for the recreation of the Spanish Armada. But even that, impressive as it is on some levels, was actually a real disappointment, being ridiculous in its panto level rendering of events.
Visually lush, in most other respects it is, at best, anodyne, and at worst, mawkishly sentimental. History and substance fall prey to set dressing and fantasy. Don’t bother.