A hackneyed and over-baked Elizabethan soap opera

Rating: 5/10 (24 December 2007)

Elizabeth: The Golden Age attempts to bring us something new in the currently overcrowded realm of Tudor dynasties and kingdoms. In the past few years we have gotten HBO's stunning Elizabeth 1 and Helen Mirren's QE2, The Tudors, and the soon to be released Mary, Queen of Scots and The Other Boleyn Girl. Unfortunately Elizabeth: The Golden Age is just a recycled rehash of these films and a souped up costumed soap opera.
The film covers the ground late in Elizabeth's life prior to the Spanish Armada. With the lack of an English male heir, the Spanish kingdom is closing ranks on her throne, pushing forth their candidate to rule the English throne.
Elizabeth is the meantime is swept up in her dealings with the smooth Sir Walter Raleigh. She is supported by the pretty but pointless in terms of story lady-in-waiting Bess Throckmorton, and Geoffrey Rush who is surprisingly reserved as her counsellor Sir Francis Walsingham. While all the actors involved are undoubtedly talented, they don't really have anything to do and their efforts are wasted on the atrocious script which amounts to nothing more than soap operatic gazing and tantrums.
Not even Blanchett can save this train wreck of cardboard cut-out characters, juvenile musing and tantrums, simplification of the English and Spanish characters, and their respective puerile depictions of good vs evil. To top it off, the nauseating musical score only accentuated the sensationalized soap-operatic elements of this overblown cheese.
Kapur seems to have gone downhill from the last Elizabeth. This "sequel" was atrociously and pretentiously shot. Such direction involved blocking the characters form the camera with all manner of stupid objects from frames to walls and lights, shooting from ridiculously pointless angles such as ceilings and poorly edited scenes, jumping from time frames across England and Spain with no continuity of what is happening throughout the story.
There have been so many better recent adaptations of Elizabeth. The trick is not to create something better than the last, or the umpteenth version of Elizabeth and Essex, but for audiences who crave more of one of our most enigmatic leaders; something that is unique, different and not merely a rehash of soap operatic whining and outbursts. Such material as The Golden Age that would be better off on the front pages of a tabloid magazine. Honestly in the end, I just didn't care.