User reviews

I'm amazed that of all the reviews I've looked at nobody seems to have noticed one of the main points of this film, or at least how I saw it. It seems like one big homosexual fantasy, camp clothing, a glorified nude Ferdinand, a definite sexual tension between Ariel and Prospero, and as a final climax, a group of men in tight sailor suits dancing the hornpipe. This whole approach, once you get used to it, provides you with all sorts of fantastic scenes and images. The sight of an innocent Ariel being pulled towards a disgusting nude Sycorax in order to perform "her earthy and abhorr'd commands", is one of the darkest I've ever scene in a Shakespeare film. However by the end of the film I'd grown tired of the style and the final hornpipe dance was just too much to take. Still overall its an interesting interpretation of the play.

Most of the words are Shakespeare and the names are the same. This is Derek Jarman's rewrite. Then we go downhill from there. Most of the people have gratuitous birthday suit scenes; Toyah Willcox gets to show off what her 21-year-old accouterments looked like at the time.

There is an immediately recognizable actor; Peter Bull who played the Russian Ambassador Alexi de Sadesky in Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964).

Elisabeth Welch sings "Stormy Weather" - I wonder what Shakespeare would have made of that?

Even though this is supposed to be a primitive island that Prospero was just dumped on, the house even if old is too Gothic. The environment just does not fit the play in any age or place or fantasy.

I do not believe there is a version of this movie floating around out there that has "Closed Caption."

Still this needs to be added to your collection.

You may find a few of your favorite lines missing in this version.

Into this primordial mix, add some seventeenth century magic, and you have Shakespeare's "The Tempest", a play whose themes are: freedom, temperance, repentance, and forgiveness. The main difference between Shakespeare's play and Derek Jarman's film is, of course, the nearly four hundred years of change in theatrics that separate the two artists.

Jarman's version tries to adhere to the play, in that the film uses quasi-Elizabethan linguistics, which renders the dialogue difficult to understand. The play's intent is still intact in the film, if a little obscured by the language, and is conveyed mostly through the acting and the cinematography, though "adapted" in style to a more contemporary audience. Hence, the film's inventive finale features a vocal rendition of "Stormy Weather", a modern metaphor for a message that spans the ages.

Even with the updated visuals, this film is going to be a bit much for most viewers. It is just too out of sync with what modern audiences expect. On the other hand, for those few who appreciate Shakespeare, the film can be insightful, with the proviso that it is not "pure" (or literal) Shakespeare.

I thought this was very "different" compared to most modern interpretations of Shakespeare and enjoyed it thoroughly. It would not be useful for those studying it at school etc. as it does not show the traditional Shakespeare character interpretations (i.e- Miranda is portrayed quite punky compared to your traditional Shakespeare lady) but for understanding of the play and for the basis of the story it is a very strong piece and fantastic to watch. It does not include also the correct format, as in the layout of acts and scenes as I am currently playing Miranda in a production and most of her lines had been cut and some scenes split and mixed around but it is very useful and I would definitely recommend it as a must-see even if just to say you've seen it! Shakespeare fans would love this!

Derek Jarman has shown us time and time again that dialog is not his strong suit. He is a painter, and paint he does. His films are almost always visually splendid, but about as exciting to watch as paint that is already dry. Watch his movies in fast forward, the really fast setting that you can only get on DVD. In The Tempest, Jarman does very little with the script or the characters, using them as simply a lattice to hang a very long and well-constructed cinematographic frame. He even goes so far as to contradict Shakespeare's original script to achieve these excrucriatingly slow and lifeless scenes. There is none of the romance, magic, trickery, or urgency the script calls for, little spontaneity, and the character of Caliban in particular is reduced to a quivering and insane idiot of sorts, similar to Gaveston in Jarman's Edward II. It is too bad that this is just about the only film version of The Tempest available.

The Tempest has been interpreted in many different ways ranging from more or less traditional views as dealing with Art to more post-modern approaches that like to dissect the play along post-colonial, feminist, gender or deconstructionist lines. The reason why Jarman's version left me fairly cold is that I didn't have a clue what he was on about. What is the underlying vision/idea/concept behind this rendering of Shakespeare? The previous reviewers do not get much further than revenge tragedy, punk show, but surely there is more to it, isn't there? This is not to say that there is no vision here, just that I was hard put to discover it. Be that as it may, there are still things to enjoy. The punk flavour is refreshing and funny. Toyah Wilcox as Miranda and Jack Birkett as Caliban are wonderful. I did not much care about Williams as Prospero ... not enough magic I suppose. The switches between the old monastery/castle and the (very English) world outside can be a little unsettling at times, but I guess that is intentional. All in all, interesting but not quite the success I had hoped it might be (particularly after seeing Jarman's Caravaggio).

"Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounc'd it to you, trippingly on the tongue; but if you mouth it, as many of our players do, I had as lief the town-crier spoke my lines."

Those are the directions that Hamlet gives the players on how to perform the Mousetrap. While the rhythms of Elizabethan English are difficult for Americans, they seems to come naturally for British actors, and those here perform it well enough.

The problems with this production arise, as they often do for THE TEMPEST, from the director's efforts to make it visually striking. Because of the magic that lies at the heart of Shakespeare's autumnal work, its gorgeous language has fallen prey to people who think the best way to stage it is to think what Quentin Crisp would sneer at as too camp and turn it up a couple of notches. One Shakespeare in the Park staging required a dozen people to play Ariel, including a Sumo wrestler; and Peter Greenaway's gloss on the play, PROSPERO'S BOOK, is so bad that when I saw it with some friends, I disrupted the occasion by guffawing at the over-the-top images. They show up here, too.

What all these geniuses fail to realize is that the play is a boy-meets-girl story, something Shakespeare wrote several dozen times. At its core is a coming-of-age story for Miranda, an adolescent girl who is old enough to leave her father. She is confronted by various male archetypes before settling on the only boy her own age. The Bard of Avon's message is so normal, that like should marry like, that youth calls to youth and that Show Business is the process of taking these ordinary and important stories and making us pay for them by wrapping them in mystery ... well, so normal that people miss the point.

The play's real magic is the story of Rapunzel and Snow White and all the other fairy tales which Bruno Bettelheim has shredded to show their symbolic content. That and the language. These should be enough for anyone like me, who cares for these things. It's too bad that the people who produced this version either don't care about Shakespeare or think that no normal person will.

The stuff dreams are made of. A complete retelling of the play as a dream of vengeance: will baffle purists, but will delight the open-minded. A superb effort: great cinematography, acting, and script. 11-stars...***********

For me, the Tempest and its characters (by which I mean the admirable ones) are like old friends. Ever since I first began to experience the play through acting classes (I played Ferdinand) I found myself immediately caught up in the fantastic world that Shakespeare created. I can distinctly remember one student deciding not to play Ferdinand after all, and so I took the stage and had the honor of playing opposite an excellent Miranda.

One of the virtues that a great friend has is that you can never fully know them - there is always something you can discover about their character. A film production of the Tempest of quality is thus like a visit to an old friend, dear to one's heart: each visit presents one with new perspective on the memory we had of the work. With Prospero's Books, the ritual and the elegance of the play was emphasized, the exuberant celebration of art within the art. Here, we see a vision as esoteric mysticism, with lovingly crafted interiors full of candles and chalk diagrams on floors, more Aleister Crowley than Naples nobleman. It also made me reconsider - why was it that Prospero was cast out of Naples? His magical power is so palpable in this production that it makes one wonder whether it was just politics that doomed Prospero to exile, but rather the fact of his difference from his peers. So, in the real world, he suffered. Was cast out, powerless to change the wrong to the right. All of the villains in this play, whether they realize it or not, act in accordance to creating a more pain-filled, hell of a world - it is always in the interest of the oppressor to make life on Earth closer to hell. But Prospero manages to bring these terrestrial villains into his island, the realm where he has (absolute) dominion.

Shakespeare brings his audience to the theater, the realm where Shakespeare dictates the events, the words, the outcomes. Shakespeare is, of course, Prospero - but what this film adaptation does that really honors the text is to make Prospero so sympathetic such a figure of reason, despite the fact that he is surrounded by what society calls irrational (astrological texts, alchemical symbols, magical diagrams, etc.). Is it more rational to be a man of the cloth and murder, or to be a heretic and work towards the righting of wrongs? Prospero IS a heretic, for the reason he abandons his magic is not because the books will lose their value in Naples, but because they are not necessary anymore - the world itself - has become the magic of the books.

In Hamlet, Hamlet presents a play to his peers. The play accuses his fellows of conspiring against others for their own advancement. The reaction of the audience varies: while Ophelia is puzzled, Claudius reacts with stunned shock. This happens within the play, and then Shakespeare has this play performed for the men of his time. Did Shakespeare watch for their reactions? In the tempest, Prospero lives the play he is constructing, and we live it with him. How do we react? Do you react with simple delight at the happy ending? Are you upset and shocked by the strangeness of this production, which is entirely fitting given the source material? Do you feel sad at the fact that this little life, the play, is rounded with a sleep, as transient as it is eternal? The tragedy is that Shakespeare creates a paradise of reason and hope for mankind's life on Earth but man is weak, and unwilling to realize it in favor of petty power struggles. We have Claudiuses.

Like a good friend, this film is not without its flaws. I disagree with the choice to paint some scenes entirely in blue. The dance of the mariners is rather tangential. But at the heart this is truly The Tempest, and one of its many faces.

I have read all of Shakespeare's plays, seen productions of a majority of them and even acted in and directed some. I do not necessarily believe that Shakespeare must be done in the "traditional" fashion, but I hated this movie.

There is nudity that is gratuitous and unnecessary. There is grotesqueness that is far beyond what I believe Shakespeare intended. Some of the dialogue is incomprehensible, and there are those elements, like the singing and dancing that add no meaning to the movie, but replace Shakespeare with the director's self-indulgences.

I am sorry to say that I wasted perfectly good money to buy the DVD of this movie.

A wonderful version of The Tempest. The atmosphere mkes it striking. The ragged old dark palace where it's set. The gothic punk acting. The excitement, drama, and passion it adds to the play. It brings out the mythical and magical side in a playful way, with a dark gothic flavour. Those expecting a costume drama and Shakespeare play in theatre wan't like it. They won't see the humour and drama. Those who remember the seventies will love its hilarious festive playfullness.

Derek Jarman's take on Shakespeare makes it into something of a punk symphony, without sacrificing the heart of the play. His cast are mostly very good – especially Heathcote Williams as Prospero, Toyah as Miranda, and Karl Johnson as Ariel – and the bits that are added fit in well, especially Elisabeth Welch's appearance singing ‘Stormy Weather'.

Comedy light relief is provided by Ken Campbell and Christopher Biggins as the shipwrecked drunks finding themselves on Prospero's enchanted island, with Jack Birkett as a creepy Caliban.

The film keeps the interest by using the unexpected – it may miss the point of the quieter moments of the play but makes up for this by its sheer inventiveness. Even the songs are treated well with Johnson's sharp suited sprite showing a mischievous streak which works perfectly. All this is covered with a queer gloss which informs the play with a new perspective.

This movie sucked. I was studying "the tempest' at school recently, and this being the most faithful adaption my teacher could find, we watched it.

Prospero looked more like an incarnation of Doctor Who, Miranda was some kind of seventies punk-brat (no change there, then, for toyah wilcox) and derek jarman clearly held the misguided notion that showing the fullfrontal scene of ferdinand clambering ashore in the buff would be enough to save this crap from descending into seat squirmingly, buttock clenchingly arduous cinema.

however, unsurprisingly, scenes added more for the titillation of the director than for the enrichment of the production will not (shock horror) help this utter trite.