lot of familiar, but perhaps not enough

Rating: 5/10 (24 January 2016)

I haven't seen the Scottish play, so I was really looking forward to Macbeth. Besides A Midsummer's Night's Dream (both live and big screen versions), Romeo and Juliet (courtesy of Baz Luhrman, and its homages) and the small part of Julius Caesar we covered for my GCSE, my exposure to Shakespeare is embarrassingly limited. The trailer I saw one week earlier (before the superb "The 33") was so promising. Unfortunately it quickly became obvious why Macbeth is not as frequently revisited in the theatre as other more familiar Shakespeare plays. The language was just too inaccessible and despite the action promised by the trailer and the 18 certificate in Malaysia (Why? The Hunger Games has more graphic violence) it was spread too thinly amongst the monologues. One of my ESL friends fell asleep, the other could follow along me easily than me thanks to the Chinese and Malay-language subtitles we get in Malaysia. Sure, Michael Fassbender, Marion Cotillard and the Scottish landscape all looked incredible. But for the 2015 audience it would have been appropriate to reinforce the story with visuals (think Speed Racer, but maybe toned down a bit). To be fair, MacBeth did channel the battle scenes of 300 (and Braveheart), and elements of John Wool or other Asian kung fu epics with red smoke and silhouette, (and perhaps unintentionally, Star Wars and the Hunger Games -Princess Leia and Effie Trinket through Lady MacBeth's hair and makeup, and Game of Thrones – did anyone else things the wyrd sisters were Craster's wives?) but it wasn't enough. Perhaps Marion Cotillard is too nice a person for the role, but unfortunately her performance was overshadowed by her compatriots much more moving performance I saw the week before in "The 33".