Essay Comparing Hamlet And Franco Zeffirelli's Hamlet
750 Words3 Pages
One of William Shakespeare’s most famous and perhaps most convoluted plays is Hamlet. In this tragedy, Hamlet, the main character, is mourning the unexpected death of his father, Old Hamlet. During this melancholy time in the kingdom, Gertrude, Hamlet’s mother, marries her deceased husband’s brother, Claudius. Naturally, in Hamlet’s frazzled state of mind, chaos ensues. Both Kenneth Branagh and Franco Zeffirelli beautifully portrayed this pandemonium. Despite this one of these movies can be considered far superior to the other in terms of entertainment. Kenneth Branagh’s live-action version of Hamlet is exponentially more entertaining to the modern audience that Franco Zeffirelli’s because it contains the original script in it’s entirety, it has more modern clothes and scenery, and it’s actors present their characters genuinely. In Branagh’s version of Hamlet, the entire script is verbatim. This allows the audience to understand exactly what is going on in each scene, and the backstory behind everything that is said. They…show more content… In Branagh’s version, the actors portray their characters as though they had been playing that role for their entire life. This can especially be seen when Kate Winslet is playing Ophelia after she has gone mad. The way that Winslet acts mentally unstable makes the audience believe that she has actually gone insane and creates a very riveting sequence of scenes. Despite having some noteworthy actors in his version, Zeffirelli takes a different approach to how he directs his actors. In the scene in which Hamlet is killed by the poison from the sword, if takes Hamlet a very long time to die in which it is obvious to see that Mel Gibson is over acting. Although this does paint a vivid picture, it doesn’t really hold the attention of the audience and captivate them as the full version