Comparison Of Baz Luhrmann's Romeo And Juliet

603 Words2 Pages

Baz Luhrmann’s “Romeo + Juliet”, released in 1996, is a film set in the modern day in which the lines from William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, a very famous play which has inspired much media since. As for what Baz Luhrmann accomplished with the source material, it is safe to say that his film absolutely butchered it. The modern day setting in the movie offered a fantastic opportunity to highlight the connection between ongoing feuds in the middle ages and today’s issues of social class separation, gang violence, and political polarization. This route was not taken, but rather the one of drilling as much absurdity and distractions into the film as possible. The worst three issues of the film are that the film makes the writing of the story clash with the setting rather than compliment it, the film has generally terrible cinematography and is littered with distractions that make following the plot much harder than it needs to be, …show more content…

With these three issues, the film completely and utterly fails to connect with Shakespeare’s story and at times is just plain insulting to the original work by completely missing the point of a scene or even a character. The modern day setting of the film had excellent potential to tell the tale of Romeo and Juliet and tell add to it by drawing similarities in the divisiveness of what is now perceived as an old and perhaps uncivilized time, and the very present divisiveness of today, which could very well address modern issues such as xenophobia, gang violence, and racism. This potential was killed by the uninspired, bland, and entirely passionless shoehorning of the original writing into a completely unrelated setting with no adjustments

Open Document