Indefinite Love

Rating: 8/10 (22 July 2007)

"I Love Thee." Love, Amor, Aroha. Love, love, love, love, love. What is this so called love? Baz Luhrman's version of Shakespeare's 'Romeo & Juliet' can answer that question for you. Bursting with many different loves from arranged love to forbidden love, forbidden to doomed love, to name a few, and portrayed in such fine detail along with its amazing cast such as Leonardo Dicaprio as Romeo and Claire Danes as Juliet who both play the love scenes with immense passion and ease, giving its audience a taste of what true love really is. This is truly "A film that will kick you in the heart.
This is a powerful story of chaos, fate and above all, love. Set in a modernized Verona, where daggers, rapiers and swords are used as brand names for guns. A place where you will see guys dressed in Hawaiian shirts, cars with speed and police men with a modern look, who and which are all surprisingly relevant to Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet script. But most importantly, it is a story of two young star-crossed lovers who meet at a party and fall deeply in love, but then find out that they belong to families who have been enemies for a period of time. This love the two lovers, Romeo and Juliet have, is then kept a secret which becomes more and more difficult to hold on to leading to the most brutal things.
From the scene with the aquarium where Romeo and Juliet first encounter each other to the 'blue' and tragic ending, the love stayed alive and stole my heart. The love in this updated movie was way to powerful to keep anybody's tear drops in place and it definitely was worth the sniffs and the subterfuge of hiding behind the sentence "I just finished yawning." An idea in the movie relevant to love, that I LOVED, was the use of water. I see the water is Romeo and Juliet's love world, Romeo and Juliet first meet at a fish tank where they start flirt, Romeo and Juliet fall in pool and start kissing etc. But I also see the water as dangerous in some way, Tybalt dies in water, families drenched in rain, which shows and tells me that you shouldn't get involved with Romeo and Juliet and their love, or you will pay.
This film truly is an amazing movie and I could just see all the time, effort and hard work that was put into making this just by watching it. If five stars meant "Very Very Good", then the eight stars I give this movie would just show how much love I have for it. "Did my heart love 'till now?" (Romantic movies that is), why yes, yes it did, thanks to this version of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. The strongest love story ever told.