Religion In Romeo And Juliet

Baz Luhrmann’s theatrical film adaptation of William Shakespeare’s play is set in the fictional location of ‘Verona Beach’, with pop music and gunfire being a common theme throughout the film. This particular adaptation of Shakespeare’s play was a commercial success, proving to be popular with teenage film viewers. Distinguished by Luhrmann’s brilliant style and artistic flair, as well as Jill Bilcock’s fast-paced editing, this film adaptation is a compelling introduction to Shakespeare’s play and his language for modern teenagers. A feature film like this must capture the audience’s attention from the start, setting the scene and providing information about key character’s quickly and efficiently. Baz Luhrmann certainly achieves this in the …show more content…
In the making of Romeo and Juliet, Baz Luhrmann has cut about forty percent of the original dialogue; instead he has substituted this dialogue for a unique, wacky, and heavily religious sense of imagery. This is evident through the use of religious iconography throughout the film. The film’s feuding families, the Montagues and Capulets, display religious icons on everything from their guns to pendants. I believe Luhrmann uses these religious images and structures to convey the positive presence of religion, particularly in the case of Romeo and Juliet themselves. An example of this during the opening scene is when a black title card appears reading ‘IN FAIR VERONA’, which flashes several times before the camera finally zooms to its destination: an enormous statue of Christ, which stands at the centre of Verona beach. The heavy instrumental that plays during this opening scene is a dramatic religious chant, heightening the tension of the sequence and further emphasising the already extremely evident religious nature of the city. After the final appearance of the black title card reading ‘IN FAIR VERONA’, Luhrmann cuts back to a close up of the statue of Christ, before rapidly zooming out to reveal the statue’s place in between two much larger buildings, owned by the Capulet and Montague families. Luhrmann then continues to cut between shots of the statue and news footage type shots of Verona Beach, including shots of police cars and helicopters, and a church that features another religious statue on its roof. The opening montage immediately and effectively allows the audience to associate Verona Beach with heavy visual imagery and exaggerated religious iconography. Luhrmann’s montage then continues to introduce the main characters of the film, launching into a series of extremely significant images from later in the film: Romeo entering the church filled with neon crosses, the