The good:
To be fair, most of the talent is not bad at all (considering mostly Americans playing arch English-voiced icons, which is usually – Ms Streep excepted – disastrous).
The bad:
The scrip is ridiculous and philistine in the extreme. Why not at least check a few basic facts for such a biopic? How can the most basic genealogy be so difficult for American production teams to fathom? E.g. In a scene near the end we have Prince Phillip in bed with the Queen (BTW it's been publicly noted for decades that they have separate sleeping-chambers, remember when world news covered the Queen's sleeping-chamber being broken into by a disturbed intruder and she was left to deal with him entirely alone?) referring to 'the king, your great uncle Edward ...' Hello? King Edward VII was the Queen's great GRANDFATHER, not UNCLE. King Edward the VIII was her UNCLE, but not GREAT uncle. No great uncle of the Queen's was a King Edward.
When yanks try to do English royal stories of historical significance they make such unforgivably clumsy blunders. Just like the Tudors series (aimed at US viewers), where our current English Royal family's ancestral link with the Tudor Dynasty – sister of Henry VIII Princess Margaret Tudor – is morphed into her sister Princess Mary but keeps the same forename (because they insultingly assume viewers are too dumb to follow a true story with 2 Princess Mary's involved, i.e. the other P Mary in it being Henry VIII's daughter rather to sister ), and is then married off to some fictional European monarch, quite erasing the facts explaining our present royalty's proper right to rule, which are that Princess Margaret Tudor married King James Stuart IV of Scotland, hence our royalty's Stuart lineage which, in turn, takes them back to the Tudors, whose daughter Margaret married into the Stuarts. Furthermore, the actress playing Catherine is called 'royal' in IMDb trivia page, but she's not royal at all, she's from a titled family, sure. But when did every titled Brit family become 'royal'?
The verdict:
Really guys, the film's awful music aside (best kept nowadays for a sliced-bread commercial or whatever), this vital genealogy stuff usually central to these tales is not rocket science (millions use Ancestry.com and mange OK). If you're going to spend megabucks why not save yourselves the global embarrassment and do 5 minutes' basic research (which you oughtn't need do anyway if you had even the most elementary schooling)?
