Not Shakespeare, not history - rubbish

Rating: 4/10 (15 October 2019)

I will start positive and say that the battle scene was unhistorical but v good in its own right. Clearly inspired by the Game of Thrones battle, it gives us the brutal grappling style of warfare of this period. EDIT: I should also add that the score is excellent.
Now to the negative:
This movie is boring and spineless. Apparently based not on history but the plays of Shakespeare, the screenplay is utterly uninspired by both. It consists of people sitting in small rooms mumbling modernist platitudes in faux-shakespearean - shot, reverse-shot. Why is Falstaff, one of the most celebrated jovial, care-free characters in literature, a mopey, mumbling, shell-shocked, bearded hipster? When they are not in rooms (or tents) King Henry is at the head of his slate-faced zombie army of Englishmen without personality. Where is Fluellen and Pistol? Where is the conversations with the soldiers the night before the battle? We do, however, get a terrible attempt at a speech - but I will get to the performances later. The film is spineless in its portrayal of Henry V. How do you give this rather bloodthirsty historical figure a character sympathetic to modern sensibilities? Why, make up a conspiracy behind his invasion of France. This is not Shakespeare's Henry either. It seems the writers only made it based on the plays rather than history so they could include an unhistorical riotous youth, and can add Falstaff - in this version, a man of the people who can spout both philosophy and battle-winning strategies. It is certainly not history, but it is not Shakespeare either: it is a painfully dull plot languishing in abject fantasy. While Timothee Chalamet's perfomance occasionally rises to mediocrity, his best attribute is that he looks almost identical to Henry's famous portrait. However for most of the screening time they would have benefited from just using the king's funerary effigy. His performance is risible, and his accent embarrassing. While Robert Pattinson's performance made my skin crawl (I think this had more to do with direction than ability, which is usually strong), he was at least charismatic, unlike everybody else in this film.
It is clear nobody knew what they were making with this film. Rather than draw from Shakespeare they came up with their own witless banter that occasionally struggles into archaic form, then plummets into anachronism (Thomas of Clarence refers to Hotspur's head as the 'prize scalp'; obviously not an English cultural notion until encounters with the Native Americans some centuries thence). I won't even mention the historical liberalities in the plot, since it is basically all of it.
If you love history or Shakespeare, stay far, far away from this mess.