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Queen Elizabeth I (Cate Blanchett) faces threats to her rule from abroad and at home. Now, she must endure multiple crises late in her reign including court intrigues, an assassination plot, the Spanish Armada, and romantic disappointments.
Every shot, every costume is decadent with color, and every single twitch of Blanchett's face is imbued with meaning as she negotiates her way through her warring roles of being a woman and being a queen.
As an historical reenactment it suffers from a great deal of simplification in order to make complex events quickly and easily understandable, and as a drama it suffers from a great deal of build that never really pays on it's promise.
While the performances keep the film afloat, Kapur's over indulgent direction and his inadequate interpretation of history comes dangerously close to running it aground.
I can almost recommend this film as a great-looking, bombastic guilty pleasure. But the soundtrack is unbearable, the soap opera love triangle -- laughable.
October 15, 2007
I.E. Weekly
A pedigreed romance, an excuse for Blanchett to bind herself in satin and channel Kate Hepburn.
This is romantic fantasy, not history, and much of the time you fully expect Kapur, here making his third post-Bollywood feature, to turn his cast loose in song and dance.
Shekhar Kapur's Elizabeth: The Golden Age, from a screenplay by William Nicholson and Michael Hirst, turned out to be more rousingly entertaining than many of its less-than-lukewarm reviews had led me to anticipate.