Romeo + Julieta

The amazing thing about this movie is that it has managed to re-do Shakespeare's famous tragedy in a modern setting while still retaining its original dialogue. What's even more amazing is it works. I admit that I was a little apprehensive about seeing this movie, fearing that Luhrman had either destroyed the play's beauty and power by setting it in modern times, or had butchered Shakespeare's eloquent words by making them sound more modern. I was wrong. Almost everything about this movie is just incredible.

Luhrman brilliantly casted Claire Danes as fourteen-year-old Juliet. The actress certainly looks the part, with her youthful features and innocent eyes. More importantly, she acts the part. Ms. Danes almost flawlessly captures Juliet's distressing journey from childhood to womanhood, beautifully showing her dramatic transition which had taken toll on her during her five day relationship with Romeo. When the story begins, Juliet is a naive girl, having not yet experienced true love, and by the end we can clearly see just how much her love for Romeo has deepened in passion, and how dramatically her character has developed.

Leanardo DeCaprio's Romeo was almost equally impressive. Some of his recitations of Shakespeare made me cringe, but for the most part he was perfect. One of Romeo's most important characteristics in the play is the intensity of his emotions, and DeCaprio captures this feature incredibly. Romeo is brash and impulsive, with a tendency to act on the heat of the moment rather than to first consider the situation like the more levelheaded Juliet. This unfortunate characteristic, which played a huge role in leading up to the lovers' tragic fate, is wonderfully mastered by DeCaprio and retained throughout the film. But we also, like with Juliet, get a glimpse of his character's development. At the beginning of the play Romeo is a hopeless romantic who fantasizes of love, and seems to dwell more in his daydreamed world than actually on earth. At this point he has no idea what true love really is, he only thinks he does. It is not until he meets Juliet that he can begin to comprehend the true depth and passion of love. DeCaprio triumphs in this area as well.

The other actors are superb, and wonderfully portray their characters as Shakespeare intended. But what really impressed me was, as I stated earlier, the keeping of Shakespeare's original dialogue in Luhrman's modern setting. I know some people criticize this film for destroying the romance and beauty of Shakespeare's words by setting the story in modern day Verona, but I feel that it only made the film more romantic. What Luhrman did was both bold and brilliant, and he succeeded wonderfully.

I won't speak any more of the brilliance of this film, I just highly recommend you see it as soon as possible. If you're a fan of Shakespeare like me, I think you will enjoy this hip, yet still lovely, modernization of his most famous play ever.

Baz Luhrmann's "Romeo and Juliet" is not your high school Shakespeare. It's a bullet-riddled opera of young love that has gone up in flames, and I loved most of it. The costumes and makeup were amazing. The settings were great, and the acting was immaculate. The only thing is that Luhrmann's style sometimes overwhelms the story. Leonardo DiCaprio brings raw teenage vulnerability to Romeo-his pain feels real, especially in the final scenes. Claire Danes starts stiff but grows into Juliet's grief with heartbreaking clarity. But the true standout is Harold Perrineau as Mercutio, stealing scenes with wild charisma and tragic depth.

I wouldnt change a thing. The acting was beautiful, the scenery, the costumes, the raw emotion. The best version of this tale yet.

Like many who saw this as a teenager, this was a movie that felt like the most sophisticated thing I'd ever seen, while also being accessible enough to my immature brain. And that's pretty much how I'm going to judge it today.

This is Shakespeare. It's as much Shakespeare as any other adaptation over the centuries. And yet Baz Luhrmann went in with a very specific approach, not only to modernise it while maintaining the poetic dialogue, but to also make it enticing for a teenage audience; the audience most arguably suited to the tale of Romeo and Juliet. It's chock full of the same hallmarks of modern day teen dramas; beautiful teens from wealthy families, sudden and passionate love affairs, with a dash of violence and murder, capped off with an emotional gut-punch or two. It's a tale quite literally as old as time: Star-crossed lovers finding each other against all odds, fighting to keep what they have against the forces around them, and the near-miss of longevity, like every Rom-Com airport scene. It's the type of story that has endured so long precisely because it appeals to us at the most emotional and vulnerable time of our lives, speaking to how we feel about the world around us. It's a hormonal barrage of narrative cues.

So Luhrmann takes this timeless classic, and decides to transplant it into a modern day setting to appeal to modern day teenagers. Or at least, the teenagers of the late 90s. You could probably trace a line from all late-90s fashions back to this movie, either creating the stereotypical aesthetic of the time, or merely doubling down and reinforcing it. This movie is garish. It opens with a newscast acting as the narrator, followed by quick-cuts and flybys of a city centre framed by two imposing skyscrapers, each with the name of a respected mafia-like family conglomerate plastered over the roof. Between them is a giant statue of Jesus himself, almost as tall as these skyscrapers. It's almost cartoonish in its aesthetic. We're then introduced to the Montague boys, clad in Hawaiian shirts left open to flap in the wind, riding a bright yellow topless jeep. They pull up to a gas station and encounter the rival Capulet boys, clad in dark blues and leather, with clean-cut facial hair and a menacing glare. If the Montagues gave the instant impression of good guys having fun, the Capulets give the immediate impression of brooding and serious antagonists. After an exchange of insults, they break out in a gun fight. The saturation is turned way up, the camera shakes and zooms uncontrollably, the editing cuts every second or two. It's beautiful and ugly all at the same time, as Tybalt, the Prince of Cats falls on his knees dramatically, pulls out his pistols, attaches an excessive sight, and takes aim at the fleeing Montagues. It's big, it's bombastic, it's completely lacking in subtlety. There's bright colours and shouting, and emphasis put on every footstep and gun cocking. It's so bad. It's so 90s.

Fortunately this style isn't maintained throughout the movie's runtime, but it never entirely leaves either. We get another frenetic array to the Capulet party, whereby a sexually-ambiguous Mercutio laces Romeo with Ecstasy creating a fever dream of visuals. And then there's that iconic meet-cute. The meet-cute to end all meet-cutes. And the movie slows to a halt. It remembers this isn't a story about the outlandish gang war between two mafia families, but a story about teenage love. Its garish and frenetic nature gives way to something more brooding and enthralling. Things turn serious, characters start dying, the prospect of marriage and a new life become real entities.

Judging this movie literally is a recipe for disaster. Literally it's an over-edited series of scenes full of shouting and bad judgment, about a young boy and girl falling in love immediately, getting married the next day, and then committing suicide over one another a mere four days later. Literally this movie makes no sense. It's ridiculous. But the movie knows that. It's painfully self-aware of how ridiculous this story actually is when you boil it down, so it embraces it. And this is why the prose was kept largely intact: It's poetry. The whole movie is poetry. This isn't a movie about plot points and character development. It's a movie about feelings and moments, about capturing that teenage urgency in a glowing, multi-coloured bottle. I know I had these moments as a teenager, where everything felt like the most important thing ever, where I fell in love with pretty girls without even knowing their names, where anger and joy, love and hate were all so painfully intense. Every scene is bathed in this intensity, including that opening of garish colours and overemphasised sound effects. It's a movie so chock full of hormonal energy it's intoxicating.

Leo is still a fairly young and inexperienced actor here, and his ego shines through his performance. He delivers his lines which such ferocity, like he too felt he was participating in the most sophisticated thing he'd ever done. But at this level his line delivery loses all emphasis, causing it all to merge into a mumble of Shakespearian vocabulary. That said, he's just about as perfect for Romeo as you could get. Claire Danes doesn't fare much better, seemingly struggling with the emotions of it all. It's like they were both put on auto-pilot while delivering their lines. Honestly I can't really blame them. Shakespeare's dialogue is in poetic verse, written for a different time with different dialects and slangs. We the audience are encouraged to just feel what's going on rather than follow and dissect every single word spoken. That said there are some genuinely fantastic performances her that prove that dialogue as outdated and wordy as this can be engaging and emotive. Harold Perrineau plays Mercutio with a fire in his eyes, like he poured over the script and accurately pinpointed which words needed more emphasis, and where he could embellish with gestures and intonation. John Leguizamo is also electrifying as Tybalt, grasping the over-the-top antagonism of his character and having fun with it, creating a whole new style of gun-fu to portray Tybalt's apparent fancy fighting style.

And of course, I couldn't talk about this movie without talking about the soundtrack, which gave us one of the best Radiohead songs ever written (which is a bold claim, I know). It captures the 90s the same way the rest of the movie does, with OK Computer-era Radiohead, Garbage, Des'ree, Butthole Surfers, and The Cardigans. It's rocky, it's ravey, it's as garish and frenetic as the movie's cinematography, and if you're at all a fan of 90s pop music, this soundtrack is a snapshot of that exact taste. Of course this ages the movie horrendously, but hey, we're approaching the time of 90s nostalgia, so now's the time to embrace it.

Romeo + Juliet is an interesting movie to judge, because it's a strictly terrible movie. The modern setting and 16th century dialogue goes together as well you'd imagine, despite some imaginative transpositions (like each gun's brand being a type of blade; Sword 9mm, Dagger .45, Rapier 9mm, or in the case of shotguns; a Longsword). It's so intensely bright and colourful, the editing so frenetic and hard to follow, and the story being somewhat nonsensical by modern standards, but its self-awareness makes up for it, making it all feel deliberate and purposeful. We hold Shakespeare up on a pedestal these days, as some form of high art, but in his time he was basically writing the best soap operas, aimed at entertaining the commoners (the exact same trajectory as actual operas, incidentally, which are nowhere near as sophisticated or intelligent as modern high society would have you believe). With that in mind, and Luhrmann's attempt to make what Shakespeare would've made today (in 1996), I think this movie nails every goal it aims for. It's pure visual poetry, encouraging you to feel the story than follow it intently, blasting you with the intense emotional highs and lows of hormonal teenagedom. I give Romeo + Juliet a bizarrely successful 8/10.

This movie does an excellent job of combining Shakespearian dialogue with

modern imagery. Admittedly, I first watched this movie when it came out

because of Leo; eight years later (and seven years after middle school ended), I realize just how well-done this film actually is. Luhrmann did an excellent job of making the movie believable while using the quaint language. This movie

brings new life into the words of Shakespeare, and even if you know the play

almost by heart it is refreshing to hear the words in an entirely new context, and one which makes sense. This version of Romeo and Juliet actually does add

something to the extensive history of the play. The soundtrack is excellent, the acting is appropriate (Danes and DiCaprio do a wonderful job of portraying the young lovers), and the scenery is fabulous. This film jump-started the trend of modern-day Shakespeare remakes, and I think it's the best one.