Some of this melodrama pulsed just beneath the surface of Kapur’s first Elizabeth movie, erupting in the final scene with a banging release of tension. It’s hard to pinpoint cause, but the effect is unmistakable: overwrought melodrama. Or maybe Kapur’s lost his nuts ‘n bolts since 1998. In fact, it was probably some boardroom dunderpate with the very same gimme my Armada! vision who shat all over the battle sequence and, by extension, most of Elizabeth: The Golden Age. And given director Shekhar Kapur’s track record (he of the 1998 Elizabeth and Bandit Queen, an unforgettable Indian film about another woman who grasps power in a male-dominated world), I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt and assume gangrenous studio meddling. Unfortunately neither the battle scene nor the context in Elizabeth: The Golden Age bring it home. Who doesn’t love a major historical battle writ large, bracketed by a strong cinematic context? Where the hell’s the goddamned flotilla? I’m generally a crotchety CGI-basher, but there’s something about the promise of seeing dozens of Spanish and Portuguese man-of-wars drowning in their own hubris that’s always kind of beckoned. We have the goddamned technology, I complained. Tom Hooper’s recent version with Helen Mirren seemed promising, but it too skimmed over full representation, preferring politics to pandemonium (not that there’s anything wrong with that). I’d been waiting for an Elizabeth I movie to render the defeat of the Spanish Armada onscreen, but none has ever really delivered to my knowledge.
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