Good Film, Bad Shakespeare

Rating: 3/10 (29 July 2015)

The text has been modernised and brought forward to resemble a modern war. However this war is a fictional one made to resemble the war between the Volscans and the Romans, a more effective way would have been to place this within a modern conflict which would have resonated more with the audience. All of the settings have been kept true to how Shakespeare intended yet that seems to be the end of what he intended. I had my doubts when I saw that a screenplay had been written and my fears were realised when watching the film. I tried to follow the film with the play however I soon hit trouble when I realised that Logan had changed most of the script. There was no real fluidity in the film and I realised that there was many changes within the script in order to fit it to the big screen. The character of Valeria is all but forgotten in the film and in what I can only guess is poetic licence the character of Menenius kills himself on the bank of a canal. This I thought was strange as Menenius was a key character in the play and yet Logan decided to write his screenplay so that Menenius took his own life, something I deem out of character of him. John Logan has all but butchered the original script and as far as I can tell only one full passage remains from the original text, this comes from scene 3.3 and is spoken by Coriolanus. The passage 'you common cry... There is a world elsewhere' is the only one I could follow in its entirety from the book while watching the film. The female characters of Volumnia and Virgilia are cut and a smaller role than in the script with almost an entirety of one of their scenes cut from existence. It seems lines have been removed to add in unnecessary violence. Through the entirety of the film there were moments when violence seemed like it was just added to create a brutal and bloody storyline. While that is important in this particular play, the main theme found throughout is betrayal. Coriolanus is betrayed by his people when they banish him, Aufidius is betrayed when Coriolanus decides on peace, Coriolanus betrays the people of Rome when he looks down on the poor. These moments seem to be lost amongst the violence. The film soon became just another war film instead of honouring the plays beginning as a Shakespearian Tragedy. As well as losing some of the lines to Logan's screenplay we lose some lines to the intense noise present in some scenes. During the scenes at war the sound team have taken the idea of conflict too far. Gunshots were all to frequent and the shooting of innocent people made it hard to watch in places. I found this far too brutal to class it as anything but a war film and whilst good in its own right, the film lacked the finesse expected from something that began life on stage. Scenes had a specific order and a lot of the war is not shown on stage, when changing this you run the risk of losing the flow, which this did in some places. Sometimes it seemed rushed whilst the 'epic' battle scenes were slowed right down. This could be due to the screenplay being written by the same man who wrote the screenplay for Gladiator. I find it quite easy to follow and understand old English; however the changes and cuts made caused much of the meaning to be lost and lost to what. Violence and blood. This is all that I could really take from it. A good film in its own right, however a bad adaptation of a piece of Shakespeare.