Complete and utter disappointment

Rating: 2/10 (10 January 2016)

Wow. What a complete and utter disappointment. From the moment that I saw the rumours and the pictures popping up around the web that Michael Fassbender was to play Macbeth, one of the most brilliantly written characters of all time, I was all over the place of excitement. The imagery looked stunning and anything that Fassbender touches becomes gold. To follow it up with a brilliantly cast Paddy Considine as Banquo and, in my opinion a little too young, Marion Cotillard as Lady Macbeth I thought we were set for success.
The opening is harrowing, beautiful and brilliant and it really sucks you in to their world. From the first moment costumes, props and carpentry look great, cinematography beyond beautiful and it really sets the mood. For nothing.
What follows is a drawn out, slow-paced, pretentious interpretation of the text that loses it's insanity and rhythm completely. Now I'm all for revisioning and reimagining, and there's a LOT of room for that in the play Macbeth, so I was excited, but utterly disappointed.
It's an orgy of meaningless violence in slow motion, topped off with so many close ups of blood and vomit that doesn't serve a purpose, sprinkled with, what I can only imagine being a directors "vision" with complete disregard of his actors talents.
The "redeeming part" is it's beautiful imagery, but everything else pushes this movie down to the very bottom of my list. To cite Macbeth himself, "It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."