In 1996, in a time when cartoons were apparently decent compared to today's standards and Tim Burton blessed the world with “Mars Attack”, a certain Baz Luhrmann came back after 4 years of doing nothing after releasing his first movie, “Strictly Ballroom” with “Romeo + Juliet” which is annoying to repeatedly type so I will be referring to it as R+J or alternatively, lazy. This movie was supposed to be an "adaptation" of the original Shakespeare tragedy with it being spruced up for the modern times but since it was the 90s, it had floral button up shirts, over the top drama and teenage hunks or more specifically, Leonardo DiCaprio. Yes, the 90s heartthrob takes the role of Romeo before his role in the literarily titanic role in “Titanic” with Claire Danes and if you are who she is, she was Kate Connor from the Terminator 3, proving how bad she is when it comes to acting. The movie was an massive success with it racking in $147.5 million on a $14.5 million budget and getting a score of 72% on Rotten Tomatoes but yet again, this is the 90s and they thought MMMbop was good so will this be a master class in tragedy or comedy?
The plot is pretty much the same thing as the original play so if you were forced to read “Animal Farm” instead of “Romeo and Juliet” and happen to live under a rock in the Arctic Circle, I'll do a brief summary on it. There's two main families (most likely mafia families considering the conditions we see them in) who are in a feud with each other. After a brief shootout between two of these families and a intervention from the police, we are finally introduced to Romeo and Juliet. Romeo and his friend makes plans to crash the party set up by Juliet's father. Romeo is dressed up as a knight and Juliet as an angel because of Baz was trying to be subtle but he missed out on the class about conveying ideas via visuals which explains why costumes is not a good way of doing this so we got a visual metaphor that's a bit on the nose. Juliet meets her suitor, Paris who is a naive rich guy who is depicted by Paul Rudd who is also Ant-Man so at least Marvel knows how to use its talent properly instead of having be in a total of 5 mins of this 2 hour film. Romeo then sees Juliet and Juliet sees Romeo and after a series of stops to stare each other and chasing each other until they each an elevator which I then forgot what happens. Knowing the typical romance cliches, they probably started snogging like there's no tomorrow but I could be wrong. They probably started playing Scrabble for all I know. After this encounter, they find out who they are too late and the star crossed lovers plot kicks in. I won't continue from here since I won't spoil what happens and also because I got incredible confused. What didn't help was the fact Baz was absolutely lazy and decide instead of hiring script writers, he just copied a script of the play and added new stage directions.
All the dialogue is “Ye Olde English” so unless you either have a PhD in Language Arts or was born in the 17th Century, you are going to have fun trying to understand what's going on. You may call it respecting the original work but I call it looking pretentious. Like, I get it you want it to be a homage of sorts but this is Romeo And Juliet, a classic of the years. It already has like ten thousand “homages” so what is the excuse for just copy pasting the whole original play. It’s just pure laziness and the same can be said by the actors because it just seems like they are reeling it in. The decent job done here in terms of acting is our main man Leo since he actually emotes, even if he does it by the medium of yelling very loudly at the camera. The others seem a bit like robots. They don't seem good at showing emotions. There's a point in the movie when Juliet is threatening to kill herself and it has no drama because she just looks likes she just got out of the uncanny valley. For me, these actors outside of Leo have no talent and just serves to just make the already crap and confusing dialogue even more crap and confusing.
The only thing I'm prepared to praise is stage design. Baz may of missed the class of subtlety but he was there when they covered on how to make visual representation look just perfect. One set that stands out to be me is Juliet's room at night. It's all being light up by candles which is spread out generously with its soft lighting making the scene with the cherry on top being the Angel statues since it perfectly brings across the message of how Juliet is a just a innocent angel. This is the only thing it does good and I'm ready to praise it as an example of why we shouldn't use CGI but I digress. I also think all the scenes are brilliantly well shot, proving that he is a much better director than screenwriter. For me, the visuals alone is worth putting up with the crap but I get it if it doesn’t appeal to you or the visuals don’t do the movie enough justice but I think they are brilliant and are the one of the two only redeeming qualities of this movie.
In the end, Baz has brought us a semi decent movie. It's a 3/10 for me since its only saving graces was our man, Leo and the visuals as both really bring the movie together for me. This film claims to be a faithful adaptation and I guess it is since both are out of date, overused and is only loved by people who wear rose tinted glasses. The only difference is that English professors like the original play and English teachers like the movie and I honestly don't know where I was going with that joke. Next week might be the undiscussables review if I can’t get into theatres to watch Mamamia 2 since that just came out in cinemas and I really want to watch it. As per usual, there are links in the sidebar to my YouTube channel where you can watch my horribly edited YGO montages and my steam profile if you want to stalk me on Steam.
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