The Tempest (2010)

The movie had potential, but it turned out rather awkward in this re- telling. Very recognizable actors in every role, some of them tried really hard to make it work, probably just poorly directed in that respect? Odd music choices throughout. Plus, I don't think I've ever seen worse screen manipulation or graphics. Some scenes look like they were straight up "photoshopped". To be honest, I think Syfy channel tries harder than this. Dialogue was a bit hacked up and hard to follow (hard to hear even at times). I've read the play twice in original play form (olde English), so I know what they are supposed to be saying, that had nothing to do with it, just didn't work. Shakespeare would roll in his grave if he saw this with his name on it methinks.

Fmovies: Shakespeare's last play The Tempest tells the tale of a sorcerer Prospera and her daughter who have been cast off and banished and find themselves on a barren island where she takes Caliban as her slave. Many years later she creates a tempest to wreck the ship carrying those that banished her and the survivors of the ship find themselves on the island including the kings son who falls for Prospera's daughter. Throw in a spirit slave who helps Prospera bring the newcomers to her and the slaves of the King who side with Caliban to destroy Prospera and you have a real blend of genres. Julie Taymor brings another Shakespeare play to the big screen after her magnificent version of Titus. The Tempest is really a blend of drama, romance, fantasy and comedy and with it's supernatural and magical elements it's quite a story to bring to the big screen. Changing the lead of Prospero to a female role, makes little difference and Helen Mirren as Prospera is very good, but performance wise she is the only standout with the rest of the cast going through the paces; and casting Russel Brand as the jester does not bring enough light relief and makes me wonder since when did Russel Brand become an actor? Taymor tries to makes this as natural as possible, but that's difficult to achieve with it's fantastical elements and many of the these moments fail, including the spirit Ariel, whose appearances are like Caspar The Ghost and only when he appears as a sign of madness to the king and his men as a dark ominous bird does the fantasy finally work. The film also feels stilted at times and for something that contains so much fantasy and magic it feels for the most part bland and dull and bad use of music, much of which sounds like something from a bad rock music doesn't help achieve anything. Interesting use of landscapes and Mirren's performance are worthy elements but that's not enough to redeem the film, which with Taymor at the helm doesn't work nearly as well as her previous efforts.

The Tempest is not the most riveting drama, the larger realization is after all a certain weariness with it. This is given to us as a magician who halfway through the story abandons his powers of illusion, who after conjuring to him the characters and plotting the story of revenge pauses to reflect on the emptiness of the endeavor. It's still powerful then, because we are all Prosperos alone in our island with the thoughts we conjure up to inhabit.

In Shakespeare's time, the inspiration for Prospero must have likely come from the scandalous topic of John Dee, the communion with spirits and visions through crystals certainly point at that as well as more broadly the notion of a benign magic. Magic since well before Dee and up to Crowley has tried its best to mask in so much hoopla what other spiritual traditions make clear from the start: that man is an embodied consciousness with the ability to direct that consciousness to vision. Shakespeare no doubt understood this was exactly his own art, a rich and complicated magic of conjured vision in peoples' minds.

So if this is to be powerful, you have to adopt a very intricate stance. Show both the power of illusion as vision and, contradictory, the emptiness of it, the fact it is underpinned by an illusory nature of reality. Greenaway masterfully did this in his Prospero film by having Prospero's creation of the play as vision, the vision lush and wonderful, and yet at every turn shown to exist on a stage.

Taymor is too earnest to strike this stance, in fact judging by the cinematic fabrics here she seems unsure of what direction to follow. She is an earthy woman so intuitively builds on landscape, volcanic rock under our feet. Pasolini could soar in this approach judging from his mythic films, her approach is too usual and without awe. The magic is also too ordinary. A few movie effects cobbled together in earnest as something to woo simple souls like Trinculo. Compared to the novel richness of Greenaway this feels like discarded Harry Potter work. And the cinematic navigation is without any adventure, as if Taymor didn't believe there was anything for her to discover outside the play, to conjure up in the landscape itself by wandering to it, so she never strays in visual reflection.

Mirren conveys the reflection as best she can, but that is all here, too little.

The Tempest fmovies. Julie Taymor (Frida, Titus) sets her sights on the Bard's final masterpiece, recasting Prospero as Prospera (Hellen Mirren) and letting the magic and romance loose in this very different take on The Tempest.

First, what works? Hellen Mirren does, rather unsurprisingly, and the art direction of photography are consistent with the vision of the woman who gave us Titus back in 1999. Kudos as well to the ever-watchable David Strathairn and Djimon Hounsou.

What annoys? Now we enter very subjective ground. This beautiful, deceptively simple play is turned into an amped up to the max, loud and frantic film. The electric guitar whines are painfully out of place, and Russell Brand, never guilty of subtlety on a good day, will make you claw your own eardrums out. It's almost as if Taymor had forgotten we were right there with her cast, right behind the camera, instead of sitting 50ft back in a packed theater.

This has proved an incredibly divisive film, and I feel split right down the middle on it. I admire Titus, in my mind one of the best Shakespeare adaptations in history, but whereas Taymor's turbocharged visuals and loud, often trashy use of sound and effects served as a perfect illustration for Shakesepare's bonkers gore-fest, it diminishes the more mature, heartfelt qualities of this play. The Tempest is a great playwright's swan song, the work of an aging, mature artist. Why would you give us an overly loud, ADD-afflicted MTV version?

Ultimately, this frustrating missed opportunity makes you wonder, did Taymor have her Shakespeare mixed up all along. Rather than give us "the stuff that dreams are made of", she serves us "a tale, told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing".

The Tempest is a wonderful but complicated play, and while I can understand the reactions of those who disliked it, I thoroughly enjoyed this one who I saw for the treasure that is Helen Mirren. It is not perfect, there are times where the delivery was a little too garbled or fast and Russell Brand gives a performance so lacking in subtlety that he did seem out of place to me. However, Helen Mirren is as ever magnificent as Prospera, with a commanding presence, intense delivery and sense of character and an urging sense of bitterness. Felicity Jones is an excellent Miranda, David Strathairn's Alonso is magnetic and Dijimon Hounsou is a Caliban that is both terrifying and sympathetic. Alfred Molina and Chris Cooper prove themselves to be scene-stealers, Ben Whishaw is an effective Ariel who as a spirit looks wonderful and Alan Cumming plays it straight and is good at it no matter how strange it initially is. Julie Taymor's direction is compelling and creative, especially in the character relationships, you feel the spiritual connection between Ariel and Prospera, the sadness of Caliban and Prospera's sorrowful weariness at the end and the idea to have Caliban as Prospera's shadow self was convincing. The visuals are spectacular, right from the palaces, towers, columns and the scenery itself helped by well-above average effects and sweeping cinematography. The dialogue is as poetic and witty as ever, and while some may find the rock music jarring, while it is not my kind of music, it did give some energetic flavour to the songs. All in all, not a movie that everybody is going to like, but while not perfect I thoroughly enjoyed it. 8/10 Bethany Cox

The Tempest shows a filmmaker just itching to let loose her turbulent, big-splash-of-a-canvas vision of Shakespeare onto the screen, and the itch, for better or worse, is scratched sufficiently. This is a work that takes the delightfully and eerily dark take on the Bard that Taymor had before with Titus and suffuses it with the computer-generated surreal landscape of Across the Universe. Whether you can really dig into Taymor's films or not, to varying degrees for some, at the least it's hard to ignore her artistic prowess, of pushing the envelope of what might be acceptable or just what is "normal" and stretching the boundaries until you wonder what boundaries are even for in the first place - that is, you wonder so that people like Taymor or Terry Gilliam can break them, f*** them about, and give audiences something different with the acting and the mood of the piece while, oddly enough, staying true to at least the original spirit of the source material (Beatles, Frida Kahlo, the Bard).

This time her Tempest is almost nearing all over the place visually, but luckily it's anchored on one of Shakespeare's most underrated works ; it's one of my personal favorites from him actually, a work drenched in fantasy and ideas of late 16th century God's law and man in the high and low areas of class, meaning those who have it (i.e. explorers) and those that don't Djimon Hunsou's native character. The big change to anyone who has read the play is that Prospero is now Prospera, played with big emotions and big movements of poise and stamina by Helen Mirren. Oh she's a force to be reckoned with, as a star and as a character that she's playing, and she's a practitioner of alchemy. This might already be subversive - in that time and era women like that were branded witches right away, but here it's something that is not only encouraged but flaunted - but then comes more 'colorful' though normal elements of explorers, washed up on the shore, and part of the King's army of sorts (Alfred Molina and Chris Cooper make up some of this bunch).

There's also a love story thrown in the mix between the two youngest members of the cast, actors whom, I'm sorry to say, I don't remember their names as they are kind of forgettable due to the script and Taymor's direction of them. I get the sense that among the rest of what she has to work with this is either the thing she's least concerned with, or she botched this part of the film. I didn't really buy any of this young-love stuff, not the interactions or the dippy acting, or even (to go back to the source if it's that) Shakespeare's dialog. This and a few other odd moments, such as a few scenes with CGI (some of it, though not all of it, with Ben Whishaw's spirit character Ariel who is up there with the clouds and the smoke of air) do detract from the quality of the rest of the film.

The rest of it, I should add, is a lot of fun, and extraordinary to take in. Djimon Hunsou makes his Caliban a terrifying but oddly sympathetic character, one who will do bad things and can- the scar on his face says 'Don't mess with me, Whitey' pretty clearly, even if it's said in old-school Bard speak- but has also been damaged over time. There is some depth there that isn't with some of the other supporting characters, as interesting as they are and acted as well as they are. Among the lot that I've mentioned and who are really excellent in scenes that just need plenty of good