The Queen

Rating: 6/10 (17 April 2013)

Film review of the movie "The Queen":
A nice combination of fiction movie and documentary is the movie "The Queen". "That's how we do things in the country" This statement by the Queen (Helen Mirren) describes basically what the whole movie is about. It is based on the real events happened after the death of Lady Diana, and deals with the behavior of the royal family especially that of the Queen, the criticism she got and her affords to modernize. The first time in her life the Queen gets into trouble due to her sticking very strictly to the protocol, instead of adjusting to her people's wishes. Modernization becomes a necessity if she doesn't want to loose her popularity and power. The movie starts with the election of Tony Blair(Michael Sheen) in 1997 as the Prime Minister. Tony is one of the main characters and is introduced as a very like able person. By his election he pledges to modernize Britain and has a quite negative attitude against the Queen and the whole royal family. He first brings up the question of modernization in the movie. With him being elected the people first showed their desire to a modernized country. The Queen is not comfortable with him as a new Prime Minister, but accepts him, even though she thinks of him as a young fool. It is very interesting to see how his attitude towards the royals changes over time, how he learns to understand the behavior of the Queen and learns to respect it. The Queen is a very important character too, of cause she is the one stumbling with her own attitude. In the beginning of the move she is very self confident and strong minted. Her values are: country first person second; and she rules the country and acts according to these moral values. Even though people accepted this for many years she gets criticism for it, after the death of her former daughter-in-law Lady Diana. She reacts not like people expect by going into public to comfort them but doing the complete opposite. She doesn't make any kind of statement and then joins her son and her grandchildren in Scotland. Within the movie there are two main parties build. The royals as anti-modernizers and the people around Tony Blair as the pro-modernizers. It is a very interesting development in the movie shown where both of them learn to understand and respect the each other. The Queen learns that it is modernization what her people want and that she as their Queen has to obey to this wishes, and the PM learns that the Queen is not as arrogant as he and his people suppose in the beginning. In the end they are both respecting each other, the Queen takes Tony's pices of advice more seriously and Tony doesn't judges her as much as he did before. To sum it up it is a very interesting movie that show the development of a slowly change in a country due to peaceful conversations and a caring and open minted Queen, but in some parts it becomes slightly boring due to long and repeatedly discussion scenes. It might be very interesting though to people who are interested not only in the historical aspect of these former events but also in the humanly aspect of it to persive a whole new perspective of it.