A good film overshadowed by the Polanski version

Rating: 7/10 (28 December 2016)

The biggest problem with this film is that the Polanski version exists and casts a huge shadow over this one.
I watched these two back-to-back (on the same day, Polanski first, if you're curious) and not only is the Polanski version better, but this director has not learned any lessons from Polanski. Kurzel could've made a movie that is better by taking the best of Polanski and adding the best from his own.
For better or worse, this film goes its own way.
The images are beautiful, the cinematography amazing, the soundtrack haunting and powerful. The images and sounds are great, the story, in theory, is great, but the transition from paper/theater to film resulted in a weak story.
This is a weak adaptation. For some reason, there are three screenwriters (+ director) for a story that has already been written in full. Maybe it's too many cooks, maybe it's unnecessary meddling, but what Macbeth needed was trimming, not adding (or rearranging), so something is amiss.
The result is strange. For example, upon the the discovery of the dead king Duncan, Macduff walks out and stars mumbling to himself, going full introspective: "Confusion now hath made his masterpiece."
What's wrong, you ask? They cut out him screaming "O, horror, horror, horror" which is his shock. They cut out the shock. So instead, Macduff just mumbles to himself and they have to almost beat it out of him. This production misses the point. Macduff is in shock, he screams horror, has a moment of reflection, then, still horrified, screams ring the bells, sound the alarms. Without the shock, he's simply unaffected by the death and then asks for alarm bells to be sounded out of protocol.
The film is filled with these and I'm not going to go over all of them.
I'm not a fan of theater (but a fan of Macbeth) - film is a stronger medium to convey a message, due to editing and audio-visual tricks. But this film does not take advantage of those techniques when it could. The soliloquies are better as thoughts, as voice over, which is what Polanski did. Internal thoughts. Instead, we have people going over monologues and it feels insincere and fake. You think "no one talks like that," which is not something anyone says about the Polanski version.
Private thoughts are private thoughts, speech is speech. In Shakespeare's time, voice over did not exist, so we saw the lips move, but the intent is to give us an insight into a person's thoughts. Now we just see people give long monologues, almost looking into the camera, which is something that is common with soaps, crappy TV and Neil Breen films. People talking to themselves is never a good idea.
There were things rearranged and re-imagined for no reason. Change for change's sake, I guess, but the changes are inferior to the original and inferior to other changes made by other people.
Kurzel should've watched other adaptations for ideas. Keeping the original, Banquo's ghost would be sitting in Macbeth's place. Keeping it would be good. The 2010 Goold adaptation had Banquo's ghost walk with his boots on the long banquet table, heading towards Macbeth. It's a haunting image, it is a ghost after all. But here, Banquo is sitting calmly as a guest. This is the worst of all options. Walking towards you, scary. Sitting in your seat, scary. Sitting quietly having his soup? Uh, try again.
Then there are strange decisions made. Fleance was watching his father getting killed by one man, while two men stood and watched the scene instead of capturing Fleance. Fleance only ran when his father was dead and only after he started running did they go after him. What? What were the other two doing?
I also don't understand why Duncan spent his night in a tent. I thought he was visiting a well off lord (Cawdor). They cut out the two references to "in our house" because that doesn't make sense, but why is the king sleeping in a tent? Lady Macbeth asks "what happened?" while she's standing inside the tent a few meters from the bloody bed of their king.
The speech quality/audibility is really low. Casting and accents are strange too.
Okay, so there's a lot that's wrong in this film, but a lot that's great. It has a Dune- like quality and just like Dune fans wish there existed a single work of two separate works, I wish that too.
I wish that someone would take the best of Polanski's and Kurzel's versions and make something better.