Steve Pulaski Michael Almereyda's Hamlet gets one major thing right and that's being a near-perfect representation of its respective time period - the 2000's. The film looks like most of its props were donated from a closing down Circuit City, as tube Televisions, Polaroid cameras, video rental cases, VHS tapes, and other odds and ends of technology populate the film almost as ubiquitously as beloved characters like Ophelia, Gertrude, and Claudius.Watching Hamlet, often billed as Hamlet 2000 for good reason, in the present day is fun because it seems like the direction Almereyda wanted to take got lost in the mix of keeping Shakespeare's original play dialog in the screenplay. From the opening minutes of the film, where Hamlet sees the ghost of his father on closed-circuit Television, it's almost as if the film is playing the story of Hamlet like a technological thriller - an undoubtedly subversive move for the anthologized play. The problem with this is because Shakespeare's original dialog is kept as the screenplay, Almereyda muddles any kind of concept and believable modernization potential this story had.The same sort of bastardization took place with Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet, which had actors like Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes spouting Shakespeare's original play dialog whilst holding handguns and driving cars glossed with candy-colored paint. The concept was intriguing, but the fact that no attempt was made in efforts to modernize or alter Shakespeare's original words to mesh with the appropriate time period and perhaps add a clearer focus on the story's themes resulted in a frustrating and ultimately lackluster slog through dialog that frequently seemed impossible to discern and follow during much of the film's action.Hamlet makes the same mistake; when reading Shakespeare, one can stop and reread and go back and analyze what exactly is being said, something even I, a committed English major, have difficulty doing in one sitting. Watching a play of Shakespeare's acted before you helps showcase character emotions better than if you just read the words to yourself, but watching a film that makes an attempt to subvert the material while making you sit through and analyze the film's classically written dialog and multitude of character relations is a frustrating chore on part of the audience.Because of this, one can't really appreciate the obsessive brooding of Ethan Hawke, who plays Hamlet here in a way that is defined by slicked-back/unkempt hair, black sweaters, and a bitter, unforgiving facial expression sustained throughout most of the film, nor can they really admire the sinister Claudius played by the underrated Kyle MacLachlin. The relationship between Hamlet and Ophelia (Julia Stiles) is also criminally shortchanged, to the point where the famous "nunnery" scene doesn't even seem to hold waterweight because of the sterile dialog that doesn't fit the time nor the setting.Certain moments of Hamlet more-or-less send sputters of originality, especially when the technological side plays into the story. The storyarch made to connect Hamlet with the year 2000 is how Claudius took over Hamlet's father's and his brother's company, Denmark Corporation. Just from that detail, combined with an increasingly technological landscape often appearing to haunt and toy with Hamlet's psyche, one would expect a biting tech thriller defined largely by Hamlet's deteriorating mental state in the face of complex equipment.While that theme is certainly embedded in Almereyda's film, it's practically smothered underneath the frequently impenetrably delivered dialog and stunted performances. Bill Murray's Polonius and Liev Schreiber's Laertes are brutally miscast and seem to be struggling at delivering the period-specific lines of Shakespeare in a retelling of Hamlet that is largely defined in reference and depiction by the year in which it takes place. The result is a misguided rehash of one of the most beloved stories in history, succumbing to traditionalism rather than pushing boundaries of complete and total revisionism; it's like having everything from a camera, a quality condenser microphone, a boom, and some of the nicest sets to shoot a movie and opting for a picture collage with no audio-track instead.Starring: Ethan Hawke, Kyle MacLachlan, Diane Venora, Liev Schreiber, Julia Stiles, Bill Murrary, Karl Geary, Steve Zahn, and Sam Shepard. Directed by: Michael Almereyda.

eammcl Hawke's Hamlet is suffering from major clinical depression, and the film reflects this, meaning that watching it gives you some symptoms of major clinical depression, such as exhaustion, loss of willpower, and desire to end it all and just go to sleep. While the film was objectively excellent and the tone incredibly well conveyed, I feel it was the wrong tone for a movie this length. It made it difficult to finish, because it was so utterly hopeless and depressing. The adaptation itself was good, however. The overall sense I got was not so much a scenic update (Denmark to New York) as a cultural one. Ethan Hawke's Hamlet is American; were he transposed to modern England he would be different, and different still if he were French (most obviously by a clearly improved sense of fashion--that hat needs to go). One of the reviews on Netflix described the movie's Ophelia as "a brooding adolescent" rather than "the classical indecisive waif". I found this description to apply to the movie as a whole, and not just Ophelia. Ethan Hawke's Hamlet is angsty, and there's no way around it. He's petulant and selfish and the very picture of the modern American adolescent male. He cares only for himself, and is insane in the sense of being so depressed he's lost touch with reality. He spends hours upon hours watching and making bad-quality videos (as a side note, why are movies in movies always so pixelated with ludicrously bad resolution, and why are they always strongly tinted green or blue? Don't any fictional characters have HDTV?). Holed up in his room with his own little mind in place of a world, it's no wonder he goes off the deep end and starts trying to kill people. It was hard to feel any empathy for Hamlet; while he was doubtlessly suffering, he used this as a license to wallow in self-pity. I actually found myself siding with Claudius and his mother. Hamlet and Ophelia's relationship, on the other hand, was very well done. I wish the movie had expanded more on it. Overall, this is a well-done film, but slow and difficult to stick with. As a final note, I felt the R-rating was undeserved; the only justification I could find for it was the relentlessly depressing tone.

web1-66-814723 Really. This is a load of crock. The only market I can see for this is perhaps high-school students who really can't get a grip on Shakespeare's text. If you're hoping for a movie that stands on its own merits, or, alternately a Shakespeare text done well in feature film format you're bound to be very disappointed. In fact, you're bound to be disappointed no matter what. Unless of course, you have an all-blinding respect for one of the many famous lead actors. Maybe, just maybe, then you might have enjoyed it. As I'm sure many have. Perhaps a more apt title for this film might be "Hamlet - the guy who really got upset because the action section at Blockbuster was simply too limited".

tempus1 It is hard, even after having SEEN it, to conceive of a movie version of Hamlet worse than the one Mel Gibson perpetrated. However, this travesty pulls it off--employing actors who could not play a period role if their lives depended on it, destroying every line of some of the greatest dramatic poetry in English. Nonexistent diction, nonexistent brains, nonexistent timing, delivery, movement, vocal training, or any other sort of rudimentary acting technique... It is possible to schtick one's way through the kind of movies Ethan Hawke usually appears in , with no talent; it is not possible for him, or his fellow criminals here, to say one line of Shakespeare without mortifying himself and exposing his utter imbecility, inadequacy, and uselessness. The line readings are so dreadful that one wonders if he knows what these words MEAN. Even Kyle MacLachlan and Diane Venora, who are not completely devoid of talent, embarrass themselves; Julia Stiles is of the same toneless, unskilled school of 'acting' as our hero. Everything about this movie is ludicrous to the point of being parodic; what made this director and these 'actors' think they could **** with Shakespeare?