Shakespeare done away with and replaced by brutal primitive pretensions

Rating: 6/10 (25 January 2016)

Whatever happened to Shakespeare? He is almost completely lost in this pretentious whisking away of any meaning and poetry of the play by complete obfuscation of the language, the very flesh and blood of any Shakespeare drama, here mumbled in the beards or wheezed half way while most gets stuck in the throat, as if diction suddenly was anathema and banished. All previous Macbeth adaptations for the screen that I have seen have been better, and they were at least four. Things are made even worse by the fact of the alterations, the important part of the porter (peeing in the gate) has been obliterated, the murder of the family of McDuff is turned into a grotesque exaggeration like a blasphemy of the play, and McDuff's war trick in the end with the wandering forest, the very top of the play, is substituted by an intentional destructive forest fire. The battle scenes are grossly exaggerated and turned into artificial ballets made worse by slow motion, and there is little to save the film except the marvellous landscape scenery, magnificent all the way through, and the after all good acting, despite the fact that the actors are not allowed more than to mumble. Sorry, this was an indecent corruption and humiliation of the theatrical art of Shakespeare. What a marvellous film it would have been, if Shakespeare had been kept alive and allowed to shine in his language in these true landscape settings of wildest Scotland!