Hamlet Film Analysis

Ira Dane Pancho

Professor Gmelin

English 1B

25 April 2016

Hamlet Review Some wish that the language in Shakespeare’s Hamlet and his other works should be updated that way it’s easier to read in print, and for it to also include effects to perhaps make it more appealing to a twenty-first-century audience. While others thinks that nothing can outshine the brilliance of Shakespeare; which ever group you belong, the Franco Zeffirelli’s film version of the play Hamlet might give you the best of both worlds. However, Zeffirelli’s makes changes in some narrative techniques, changes the plot, and changes Hamlet’s actions. The movie felt slow and the chosen actors was both good and bad. Above all, both works of Shakespeares and Franco Zeffirelli still share the same basic story and the same characters.

Zeffirelli film starts with a shot of a huge castle on the edge of a rocky cliff, following the funeral of King Hamlet; which is not in the play, but perhaps should have been. Instead the play starts with the two guards, Horatio encountering the ghost of King Hamlet. In the film after the over view of the castle, an organ plays a solemn background music as men in medieval armor on horseback and women in the background stand in silence as if waiting for a news. The next scene in the castle’s crypt, where the king’s widow Gertrude sniffles loudly over his body. Afterwards, the film does a close-up on the major characters that will be connected in the story. There is Claudius - current