Elizabeth: The Golden Age (2007)

I like the storyline of this show,it attract me so much

Great visuals, story delivers no surprises

It's fun, it's light, [but] it has a hard time when its tries to get heavy.

After playing with our expectations, this turns out to be a very different sort of film.

Great cast, good photography, but the film depicts the English as all good and the Spanish as evil religious zealots, a caricature of history. The Spanish Armada was decimated by a storm, and not by Sir Walter Raleigh's ingenuity. He played a minor role, if any, in the whole battle.

This movie is the sequel to "Elizabeth - The Virgin Queen" (1998) and, like all sequels, suffers from an inferiority complex towards the original film. It is a regular historical film, which depicts a key moment of Elizabeth I's reign of England: the Invincible Armada and the English resistance to Spanish ambitions. And Cate Blanchett (who continues to give life to the English queen) is still brilliant in her role, almost being able to become the queen that herself. Unfortunately, as in the first film, this effort follows without the merit and appreciation of the critics and the Hollywood Academy (the Oscar nomination for Best Actress that year did not pass that same). Geoffrey Rush continues to give body to Sir Francis Walsingham and do it with great talent and ability, even though his character has not here the strength it had previously. Clive Owen is perfect in the role of Sir Walter Raleigh and reaches, with this film, one of the most interesting works of his career so far.Historically, unlike the previous film, it didn't seem very able to be faithful to the truth. The script is too imaginative and too much focused on an unlikely and theatrical affair between the Queen and Walter Raleigh. The Spanish Armada is barely portrayed and the struggle between English and Spanish, the natural film climax, ends up being completely emptied of relevance, which makes no sense and puts in question the film edition, and the quality of the script. In fact, there was no ability to foresee the importance of this point for the film's outcome. If the director (Shekhar Kapur) and writers (William Nicholson and Michael Hirst) thought that Blanchett's great interpretation, a very good cast, scenery, clothes and some romantic suggestions would be enough to save the film, they're wrong. Do not make omelets without eggs, says the people, rightly so. This film had everything to be better, to match its predecessor, but a bad script and editing laid everything to lose.Despite its a very still and boring movie (sometimes seems that people have forgotten that they're almost to be invaded), this film is quite reasonable and worth seeing, especially for the excellent work of the actors.

If your looking for a history lesson, you'd do better with Toy Story. This fluff-piece is a joke compared to its predecessor which has as much historical value as a wooden nickel. Apparently, according to this film, Elizabeth Tudor whined and whimpered and yelled all her queenly life in over-lit hallways that suggest that the halogen lamp was invented in the 16th century. Not a shadow to be seen on these movie sets. This time around, Elizabeth mopes and screams and whines like a jilted fifteen year old. Her maid in waiting, Bess Throckmorton, apparently missed all her acting classes because she could do nothing more than stare and vaguely smile. Clive Owen, who shows no more acting ability beyond that of a disembodied foot, looks like a cheap cartoon version of Errol Flynn in tights as he bandies around on ship ropes. He obviously texted in his role, sounding almost as dull and talentless as Liam Neeson doing Shakespeare. Even Bette Davis' version with Errol Flynn and Olivia De Havilland, another fluff piece, had the smarts to portray Elizabeth as a real queen, acerbic, angry, confused, intimidating to her suitors, but ultimately capable of running a powerful country, taking up more space than her underlings. Here, Cate Blanchett, whines and sobs like she had just failed her SATS and does nothing more important than wear clothes. Some scenes are so ridiculous, you'd thing you were watching a back story of the making of Project Runway. Cate Blanchett, in this version, seemed more interested in the buffet for the cast members than acting like she ruled one of the most powerful forces in European history. The only interesting piece centers on the revisionist version of Mary, Queen of Scots. Unfortunately, like half the film, her demise is filmed entirely in slow motion, making her drawn-out execution last longer than her actual life. This film would have cost half the time to watch if they hadn't filmed so much of it in slo-mo. Snore. This is the crib notes to history, lazily made for coasting high-schoolers, most of whom cheat on tests and are no more interested in actual history than the wigs on their head and their designer's dresses. Which brings us to the trumped-up reason for Elizabeth's white makeup and hair pieces. In this film, the writers want to give the impression that Elizabeth's most important decision was to become a born-again virgin. In reality, she suffered from eczema, lice and rickets. Her appearance and hair faux paus were more an excuse to cover up those maladies, not a goth need to look wacky to her subjects. While the previous film suffers from revisionism and loose attention to history books, it has beauty and depth this film lampoons. At worst, the first film avoids looking like it's brightly filmed on the set of "Friends." And, strangely, in a story about an historical figure whose beauty, or loss of it, Cate Blanchett is not only very attractive but the only character that doesn't age. My advice: stop reading magazines about body consciousness, get the heck off your pointless cell phones, stop watching "Stupid Vapid Housewives from Any County, and read a book on this amazing woman in English history. She took up a lot more space than this waste of celluloid implies.

I love a good Elizabeth movie as much as anyone else. In fact, just a few days before I saw this film, I had seen a 1939 film (Private Lives of Elizabeth & Essex) starting Bette Davis and Errol Flynn. It was fascinating to be able to compare these two movies from two different eras, to see how modern cinematography has developed in its depiction of Elizabeth and the late 16th century.Perhaps unsurprisingly not much has changed with regard to Elizabeth's appearance and clothing. At least in modern movies Elizabeth is allowed to take her make-up and dress off once in a while. Even take baths.In the 1939 movie, the theme was the love affair between Elizabeth and the Earl of Essex. This 2007 movie is set somewhat earlier, but it also shows the emotional life of Elizabeth, including her feelings for Walter Raleigh.I thought that the performances in the movie were excellent. Cate Blanchett was marvellous. So was Samantha Morton and Geoffrey Rush. Clive Owen too was really good, especially at the start where he is trying to catch the queen's eye. His tale of making the crossing and reaching the new world was as gripping for the viewer as for Elizabeth. Say what you want about Clive Owen, he's good.In this movie many of the scenes were achingly beautiful. At times it was like looking at a collection of Old Masters in a museum. The lighting, colour, costumes and rich settings were all used to their best advantage.The beauty of the scenes became so striking at times, however, that the artifice kept leaping out at me. At times it was so obviously beautiful, so clearly romantic, that it seemed staged and posed.I really didn't mind this aspect though. I can't get enough of modern attempts to display medieval and renaissance life. Seriously. There must be many fascinating aspects of the period that have yet to be shown on film.OK, perhaps there was a bit too much jingoism in there. I understand that Elizabeth is a patriotic figure to the English (or at least to English filmmakers), but Elizabeth the virgin guardian angel of England? Elizabeth the warrior queen? Elizabeth the mother of her people? This is wishful thinking on the part of the director and themes that don't work for me. I suspect that English people however swell with patriotism when they see Elizabeth portrayed as a virgin-mother-warrior-angel-queen in full Renaissance finery. Even in the 1939 film the Americans did this in an old-Hollywood sort of way.The highlight of the movie for me was the execution of Mary and Elizabeth's anguish at what had happened. Morton played this brilliantly. Blanchett brought to life the doubts about it and the horror of it all. Walsingham did what he had to do, but what a mess this conflict between Protestant and Catholic really was. What did bloody Mary do to deserve this? After the movie I looked it all up on Wikipedia. Mary was actually married to Philip II of Spain. I had forgotten that fascinating detail. History could easily have gone the other way. This movie did not portray the Spanish in a way that I would consider realistic. I'm sure they were not all crazed religious zealots. No more so than English Protestants like Walsingham.There was somehow a problem with the plot or writing. The film seemed a little disjointed, jumping from one grand, beautiful, melodramatic scene to the next. I was on the director's side right up until the scene where Elizabeth exhorts her troops on horseback. That went too far. Even Cate Blanchett was unable to pull that one off.Still I enjoyed the film. It's under-rated on IMDb. I'm not sure why.