Hamlet Essay Research Paper Hamlet 2000 CritiqueWhen

Hamlet Essay, Research Paper

?Hamlet? (2000) Critique

When we watch movies, we look for entertainment. That is the only reason why

theatrical movies are created. Movies create entertainment which creates money.

When Shakespeare wrote ?Hamlet? to be performed in front of hundreds, he

aimed at entertainment. But, the key to the movie business, is relevance. If

your movie has no relevance, your movie is garbage and makes no money. Mr.

Almereyda aimed for this exact quality when deciding to make a multi-million

dollar movie about any one of the billions of things to produce a movie for. He

saw the most contemporary version of the timeless classic ?Hamlet? when

creating his golden movie. Ethan Hawke would be his main character and other

popular faces would create the aside. The secret in this version, would

Almereyda emphasizing the upscale glamour of the family as a counterpoint to the

ugliness in the story.

No other ?Hamlet? came close to matching this task. But, Almereyda, being

the genius he is, created his masterpiece successfully after all. The setting is

the year 2000 Mannhatton, New York. What better place to set the scene of

Denmark, the wealthy corporation Hamlet?s father set up, to represent money

and power.

, a glowering depressive who hates his mother and stepfather for their

hypocrisy and their cold disregard for his own grief. Hamlet was something of a

pill. Hawke makes him a designer drug. In OUR time, the sinister turn of events

at the Denmark Corporation couldn’t be more apt. The interplay of location and

language gives the play its umpteenth life. It’s "Hamlet Unplugged,"

stripped-down and heady. And as a cosmetics-first experiment in atmosphere,

"Hamlet" is almost daring. Almereyda, who has done some groundbreaking

work with a Fisher-Price Pixel-Vision video camera, story