A Great but Difficult to Follow Plot and some Great Acting

Rating: 6/10 (12 May 2016)

Macbeth is based off of the William Shakespeare play under the same title and follows a knight called Macbeth who receives a prophecy that one day he will be king of Scotland. He eventually becomes tired of waiting and sets out to murder the king and succeed him, and ultimately faces both the rewards and consequences for his actions.
I love the story of Macbeth. I think that the plot is really good. It's interesting and it could be awesome if done right. Unfortunately I'm not a fan of Shakespeare, or at least how he writes. His stories are interesting, but when you can't understand a single word it makes it hard to truly appreciate how good his plays are. I've been wanting a Shakespeare movie adaptation with more modernized language, and unfortunately this wasn't the one. It keeps the same dialogue as before, and thus I ended up relying almost completely on visuals and the fact that I read the book and had what happened explained to me every two pages. If I hadn't had that I wouldn't have enjoyed this movie at all most likely.
The characters are decent. Again, it's hard to understand what their saying, but if you do there's a lot of internal conflict going on, and it is pretty cool actually, particularly in the character of Macbeth. One thing that I especially liked about the movie was the acting. Michael Fassbender was good for the first and third act, but for the second he was phenomenal, especially in a particular scene in a dining room. I knew Fassbender was a good actor, but I've never seen him in any performance where he's knocked it out of the park as well as he did here. Unfortunately he switches right back to just good acting for the third act, but his character goes from confident to scared to a "Well, I made it this far, guess I might as well" kind of character throughout the movie, so he loses that sort of insanity at the end that he pulled off so well.
Overall Macbeth is just decent. The plot is great but poorly presented, and Michael Fassbender does a fantastic job for about 1/3 of this movie. He's really the only redeeming quality of this movie, other than the visual aspect, which was quite good too. The first hour is pretty slow too, and it takes a while for the story to pick up. In the end I wouldn't really recommend this movie, but it definitely wasn't bad.