Pathetic and dated

Rating: 4/10 (22 December 2007)

In case you always wondered what was so special and important about Queen Elizabeth that she has remained one of the best-known persons in English history, this film surely won't tell you.
Its way of storytelling is at least 50 years behind. There is not one realistic and believable character in the entire film and although the images are splendid and Cate Blanchett does her best, the weaknesses of the script, in particular its puppet-like portrayal of the main protagonists are blatant.
Constantly, Elizabeth is referred to as an exceptional, unique person but it remains completely mysterious why we are supposed to believe this. She reacts all but calmly when she learns about the love-affair between Walter Raleigh and Elizabeth Throckmorton. If this is supposed to demonstrate a monarch's privation of personal wants, we have seen this much more convincingly elsewhere.
What is it then? Neither is Queen Elizabeth convincing as a Joan-of-Arc-lookalike addressing her soldiers nor as a war strategist maltreating a mosaic map with a stick. And when it comes to the death sentence of Mary Stuart, she is portrayed as the prototype of the "typical" woman too weak to bear the inevitable.
This film is not only pathetic and overblown, its look at gender is dated (and this is not because the time it is set in is the 16th century). Many a classical theater play about Elizabeth is more informative and innovative than this film.