Nice stage play, where's the movie?

Rating: Null/10 (26 June 1999)

I rented this movie because I thought it would be a good historical movie, but it looks more like a stage play than a movie. I won't comment about the historical facts, the emphasis on Elizabeth's sex and love life (bit weird when she is known as the Virgin Queen) but it baffles me that someone can make a movie that looks and feels like a stage plays in the last years of the Century and ignore 100 years of filmmaking and the powerful opportunities of storytelling that the medium provides.
When film was a novelty cinematographers used to make films that were nothing more than filmed stage plays. After the medium matured directors started using the possibilities that film offered to do something more than a mere play. They started to shoot dramatic landscape scenes often involving hundreds of actors, have more than one or two locations and emphasize on action and visuals more than on words and gestures.
In the later decades of this century stage play has begun to emulate film. When you go to a large production on Broadway or London's Westend you see lots of action, multiple scenes (thanks to very ingenious technology) and big scenes with many actors that resemble the movies more than the older stage plays. Seems that now the century is about to close at least one filmmaker is doing the reverse.