Oct 12, 2008

Henry V | Twentieth-Century Shakespeare: Kenneth Branagh's Henry V

Essay critiquing Branagh's Henry V and the director's use of film techniques and thematic development.

Kenneth Branagh's Henry V is an ambitious film. Ambitious in that it takes one of the best known and well loved of Shakespeare's plays—already made into an acclaimed film by another great English actor—and seeks to use the film's story to convey a message of the horrors of war and the moral and practical burdens of kingship and government. Compressing into five acts the actions of five years, Shakespeare wrote a play that would run approximately two and one-half hours in length, without intermission. Branagh, in editing the text, brings the film to just over two hours, exactly...