Hamlet Movie Essay

We get the idea that there was nothing essentially twisted with Hamlet until everything went wrong in his life, until his father past away and his mother married his uncle with unsuitable speed. This is a prince who was healthy and happy and could have lived a long and active life, if things had turned out otherwise. The approach also may come from Gibson himself, the most good-humored of modern stars, whose personal style is to bend seriousness with a joke, and who doesn't easily incline into self-pity and glum masochism. He gives us a Hamlet who does his best to carry on, until he is overwhelmed by the sheer weight of events. Zeffirelli sets his film in a remarkable location - a castle on an extension of the plain coast in northern Scotland, …show more content…
This is a significant world of real somatic presence, fleshed out by an uncommon number of extras; we are giving the feeling that this command rules over real individuals, instead of only being present in Shakespeare’s mind. Right at the outset, Zeffirelli and Christopher De Vore, take a right with "Hamlet" by moving some of the dialogue and adding some words to generate a scene that does not happen in the original. During the scene where Hamlet, Gertrude and Claudius are provoking one another over the coffin of Hamlet’s father at the wake. In film terms, this scene makes the central problem of "Hamlet" perfectly clear, and vividly reinforces everything that follows. It sets up not only Hamlet’s anguish, but the real lure between his mother and his uncle. The cast has at least three actors who have played Hamlet before: Alan Bates, as Claudius; Paul Scofield, as the ghost of Hamlet’s father, and Ian Holm, as Polonius. Holm is particularly active in the "to thine own self be true" speech, and I enjoyed Bates' strength of bluster and lust, as a man of feat who will have what he needs and not bother himself with the types of questions that torture