The production is handsome but much cut down from the play and does not have the caliber of acting we have seen in other recent productions of Shakespeare plays. When adapting Shakespeare to the screen there are conflictsinvolved that the Bard never knew about. He wrote in an artificiallypoetic Elizabethan English that conveys better to a 20th centuryaudience than many people realize, but still requires acting skill tohelp get the idea across. He also intended his plays to be anafternoon's entertainment that would last a lot longer than a standardfilm.
Most film adaptations are nowhere near accurate representationsof the plays.
They are usually trimmed down, and often lines and evenscenes are given out of order. There seems to be a particular respectfor Shakespearean actors because it is no easy matter to make theoriginal prose flow naturally. Orson Welles was a master filmmaker whohad more experience than perhaps anyone else did at adapting the greatworks of literature to other media. As anactor he has an expressive face and conveys by just slight exaggerationmany of the ideas in his face. It takes extreme skill to do thatwithout making the performance hammy and unrealistic, but Branagh ishas the kind of face that allows him to convey much of the meaning.