Cate Blanchett Geoffrey Rush Christopher Eccleston Joseph Fiennes Richard Attenborough Fanny Ardant
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The young monarch Elizabeth I rises to power and must contend with endless attempts to set her up with a suitor, a combative Catholic church and her burgeoning romance with Lord Robert Dudley. -- Chris Kavan
mitchellyoung 02/21/2012 (0 of 0 found this helpful)
Rating of 3/4
Elizabeth is an ambitious epic that manages to make sense of the action and intrigue that pervaded early English history. The production design and cinematography are, of course, spectacular, but so is the commanding performance by Cate Blanchett, who embodies the strong and haughty nature of royalty.
Elizabeth chronicles the life of Elizabeth I from innocent young girl to one of the shrewdest and most politically savvy monarchs in England's history. Shekhar Kapur's story of the early life of the virgin queen certainly has a very impressive cast and the material concerns itself with one of the most fascinating periods of British history but the film suffers for his approach. The early part of the film resembles a melodramatic soap opera more than anything else and suffers greatly for his unsophisticated direction that seems far more interested with unnecessary visual embellishment than story telling. Things settle down after Elizabeth is crowned Queen however, and as Geoffrey Rush's Walsingham becomes more involved in the political machinations it all gets a lot more interesting. The p...
