There’s a use of CCTV cameras throughout, but to no good purpose aside from underlining the obvious point that everyone is spying on everyone at Elsinore. The fact that it remains a filmed play means the few somewhat creative decisions fall flat. And he even has them on at the end for the fencing match with Laertes! Who fences in jeans? And he’s barefoot too! It’s like I’m watching a rehearsal for a Little Theatre production. It makes him look silly and goes against the producers’ desire to not want the costumes to be “distractingly modern.” That shirt is as distracting as you can get (though it may be better than the Superman t-shirt they were originally thinking of). The t-shirt has a really awful muscle-man print on the front, which I can’t imagine a modern-day Hamlet (or David Tennant) ever wearing. It’s a problem presented in any modern-dress production of Shakespeare: how do you render important cues in the play for antique styles of clothes? What does it mean when Ophelia talks of Hamlet appearing to her with his garters undone and his stockings down around his ankles? Well, here it means he changes out of his mourning suit and into jeans and a t-shirt. ![]() It’s all bug eyes and a stretched mouth, the sort of big emoting that works on stage but looks almost grotesque on screen. Look at the way he works his face in the grave scene, for example. I found him antic and annoying when he (or Hamlet) wasn’t trying to be. ![]() It’s not mentioned on the commentary or the “making of” featurette. But nothing in the direction or camerawork, which is pedestrian throughout, tries to sell such an image and in the end I’m not sure if anyone was aware of it. The way he bends over and then kneels down was at least suggestive of such an idea. Then, when he gives his “too, too solid flesh” soliloquy it seems as though they’ve set it up so that he actually will melt, resolve, and whatever into the mirrored black floor (apparently borrowed from a Vegas casino). He has a shaky, neurotic look to him in his inky cloak. ![]() ![]() At first sight of him I thought I might like David Tennant as Hamlet. It’s very much a filmed play, of the Royal Shakespeare Company for the BBC, and I didn’t like it as a movie or as a play. I didn’t care for this production of Hamlet.
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