Hamlet
2007: Alexander Fodor

This is possibly the most ridiculous thing done under the name of Hamlet. It begins with a shot of Ophelia shooting up with some unspecified injectable drug, convulsing, and apparently dying. In the next scene she’s back again. Oddly enough, it doesn’t seem to matter one way or the other.

Most of its scenes are against a washed-out white background, and the colors in the view are over-saturated. It’s more or less pointless from top to bottom, and despite occasionally arresting imagery, it provides virtually no illumnation of the play. Different roles are given to different genders (e.g., Polonia) or numbers (Horatio appears to be two people, one of them male and the other female, though the person credited is female). At the beginning everyone is labeled as a chess piece (Claudius is the White King, Ophelia the Red Pawn, and so on). Where this leads later is unclear — it seems just to be another wanton display of undirected ingenuity. The score is hard-driving rock. None of the characters really seems to know what he or she is saying — they’re just words, stripped, for the most part, of both their intrinsic meaning and Shakespeare’s imparted musicality.

All in all there are some infinitesimal perceptions to be garnered from this film, but it’s not worth your time as a first or even a tenth pass at the play. It is arguably a greater detriment than a benefit to the viewable corpus. At least one reviewer classed it as “Kafkaesque”. I think that’s a disservice to both Shakespeare and Kafka. I’m sure it’s meant to be very edgy. To me, it’s boring, pretentious, and insulting.

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