A well-intentioned movie that misses the point

Rating: 5/10 (7 January 2019)

For all the constant haunting violins, beautiful sunsets and striking landscapes shown in this film, it somehow completely misses the point of the story it adapts. I could accept a "loose" adaptation of MacBeth that skips about half of the play, modifies the order of scenes, combines other scenes together, gives lines said by one character to another character, and invents some plot points outright, if this retained the core of MacBeth, but this does not at all. Instead, Michael Fassbender mumbles and whisper-talks his way through a dull, practically wooden performance that strips MacBeth of what makes him an interesting character: his internal struggle where morality and reason fight against opportunism and ambition. The film is made like the director thinks MacBeth is nothing but a play about a violent guy and the various people who kills. I daresay if that's all MacBeth were, we wouldn't still be performing it 400 years after it was written. Instead of Shakespeare's beautiful poetry, the movie is drowned in over-art-directed vistas and just plain bad directoral choices (like setting the entire first 10 minutes of the film as a battle that is shot almost entirely in ludicrous slow motion--the kind of thing a first-year film student who has just seen "300" might think is a good idea).
If you want to see MacBeth presented in a cinematic style rather than as a play, I suggest the far superior 1971 version by Roman Polanski.