Get this out on DVD so you can just watch Helen Mirren as Prospera, Chris Cooper as Antonio. David Strathairn as Alonso, Alan Cumming as Sebastian and Tom Conti as Gonzalo. Whilst Alfred Molina gives a great performance as Stephano, he does it in the company of Russell Brand's Trinculo.
Reeve Carney as Ferdinand is completely out of his depth - it's like he won some kind of competition in drama school.
The CGI (mainly Ben Wishaw's Ariel - which has reasonable performance under the pixels) is sometimes good, sometimes risible and Taymor cannot prevent herself from shouting her themes from the rooftops BECAUSE THAT'S WHAT YOU DO WITH ART AIMED AT AMERICAN AUDIENCES!
If Mirren's performance wasn't so good, I'd say it's not worth seeing (unless you're curious, of course.) But Mirren is excellent, her Prospera survives being drowned out by Taymor's directorial sound and fury, so this adaptation is not entirely missable.
But it wasn't as good as the first Tempest I'd seen with a female Prospero.
... Was that Bell Shakespeare Company?
Subtlety is not exactly her strong point. I don't think I'll bother with this one - to me the whole "let's update Shakespeare in a really radical way with some gimmick casting and lots of noise and outrageousness" is getting very old.
Derek Jarman's Tempest is probably more radical, but I much prefer it (though I am going on memory, all I really remember was Heathcote Williams' Prospero and "Stormy Weather" being sung at the end.)
Helen Mirren doesn't impress me as much these days as she used to. Apparently she wants to play Hamlet. Now that would certainly be gimmick casting. The scary thing is, it will probably happen.
Hamlet.
The whole "I'm going to make a devastating feminist critique by casting women in men's roles" is embarrassingly 1970s though. To me it smacks of a lack of real confidence, a kind of apologising for being female, which to me seems more anti-feminist than feminist.
It's a tough call if you have low tolerance to Greenaway - it's certainly worth seeing Gielgud's definitive performance (I'd equate it with Paul Schofield's Lear) but there's a lot of Greenaway you have to get through.
How did they get away with that?
It's very much a your-mileage-may-vary film. Certainly you may want to check out footage on youtube before you commit to watching the whole thing.
There are two non-Shakespearian adaptations of "The Tempest" that I know of - "Forbidden Planet" and Paul Mazursky's update "Tempest (where the Prospero character is an architect played by John Cassavetes.)
of - "Forbidden Planet" and Paul Mazursky's update "Tempest (where the
Prospero character is an architect played by John Cassavetes.)
I adore Forbidden Planet, but then radical reinterpretations of Shakespeare were less of a tired concept in 1956.
Does Kurosawa' s Throne of Blood count, or would you class it as more straight adaptation?
I think it's a much more straight adaptation than Ran of King Lear (which changed the daughters to sons.)