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Romeo And Juliet Movie Analysis

Decent Essays

Romeo and Juliet is a true lovers’ tragedy, an epic masterpiece written by William Shakespeare in the peak of his creativity. It bears the existential dilemma of how to chase true love when all the odds are undeniably stacked against the seeker. The original play, first published in 1597, features the troubled paths of two star crossed lovers whose families despise each other with passion in deep extents. Over the centuries, there have been many interpretations of this play in various forms ranging from children’s books to movies, but the focus of this essay is in one movie in particular. In 1996 Baz Luhrmann released a movie interpretation of Romeo and Juliet, which added some interesting changes, to say the least, to the well renowned …show more content…

In the play, Romeo runs up behind Tybalt and provokes him to start a duel. They both have swords in the play and it is an even duel which Romeo wins (Shakespeare 3.1), unlike the movie where Romeo completely disarms Tybalt, takes his gun and shoots him three times, which implies the Romeo is blinded by rage and need for avengement, which is not the real point. The point of the story of Romeo and Juliet is not to highlight the way that each character died, but rather the mere fact that they died. The deaths are each meaningful, contributing to the moral whereas the special effects and explosive scenes are purely for money and not to address the meaning of Shakespeare’s work. By using modern costumes instead of Elizabethan style costumes the director ends up portraying the Capulets and Montagues as ignorant common criminals and gangsters instead of two powerful rival families. This is shown when Mercutio cross-dresses as a woman and comes already under the influence of ecstasy at the Capulet party, which, in turn, made him and the rest of his Montague gang seem like a group of reckless young kids that don’t really know what they’re doing. In the play, everybody at the party wore a mask that had some representation of their personality (Shakespeare 1.5). This made the costumes that people wore to the party seem more relevant, as opposed to the movie where all the costumes were random and meaningless. A key factor in

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