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Excellent, Without a doubt!!

Admirable film.

Although it has its amusing moments, in eneral the plot does not convince.

If the ambition is to provide two hours of instantly forgettable, popcorn-munching escapism, it succeeds.

The movie had potential, but it turned out rather awkward in this re- telling. Very recognizable actors in every role, some of them tried really hard to make it work, probably just poorly directed in that respect? Odd music choices throughout. Plus, I don't think I've ever seen worse screen manipulation or graphics. Some scenes look like they were straight up "photoshopped". To be honest, I think Syfy channel tries harder than this. Dialogue was a bit hacked up and hard to follow (hard to hear even at times). I've read the play twice in original play form (olde English), so I know what they are supposed to be saying, that had nothing to do with it, just didn't work. Shakespeare would roll in his grave if he saw this with his name on it methinks.

In my mind, Shakespeare's Tempest is the least graceful of all his works that I have experienced. His genre-confused hodgepodge of plots and characters, while proving Shakespeare's genius to an audience which needs no such proof, serves only to render it atmospherically mutilated. It's as if Shakespeare had three, equally tedious slogs, and decided to combine them with the sentiment that the whole would be greater than the sum of its parts.But with The Tempest, Taymor does the impossible: She takes Shakespeare's debacle and makes it worse. Even as a non-aesthete, one who appreciates bad CGI when bad CGI is due, I found myself plunging through biting aesthetic pain whenever Taymor made the choice to use it. Taymor's failure to capture the already weak atmosphere of The Tempest is simply embarrassing. Each frame is drained of colour, bland as the characters and the story which fill them, and the CGI is curiously funny, although I highly doubt that was what Taymor was going for. Perhaps she sought to bring her own style into the film, but, as demonstrated by her directorial ineptitude in the making of this film, it would probably be better for her to keep a minimal personal influence, letting Shakespeare do the talking instead.Taymor seeks to win over her audience through a pointless gender swap, adopting the "I'm original" attitude of one whose only originality resides in turning celebrated literature into films. Instead of the magician Prospero, we instead get the magician Prospera, played by Helen Mirren. Wow. Every other character remains the same. Some idiot made the mistake of casting a black guy as Caliban. As makeup-encrusted as he is, that doesn't take away from the fact that the only black guy in this whole movie plays the slave.In accord with Shakespeare, The Tempest is narratively befuddled. Three separate plots are superficially explored in under two hours. And yet, as each plodding second passes, one could be forgiven for assuming that it is longer. Overall, Taymor's The Tempest was awful, buoyed only by a few performances and the occasional fancy shot. I found myself wanting to die, to sleep.Ay, there's the rub.

Prospera duchess of Milan (Helen Mirren) was cast off with her toddler daughter Miranda by her brother Antonio (Chris Cooper). Antonio subverted her rightful rule after the death of their father. On the island, she enslaves the beast Caliban (Djimon Hounsou) taking control. Twelve years later, Miranda (Felicity Jones) is all grown up. King Alonso (David Strathairn) is sailing back after his daughter and her new husband's wedding with his son Ferdinand (Reeve Carney) and Antonio. Prospera takes revenge by unleashing a tempest to wreck their ship and stranding them on her island.Julie Taymor does Shakespeare by replacing the main male character with a woman. That's basically the bulk of what I took away from it. Shakespearian scholars will have lots more to debate. For the rest of us, this is an acting and writing exercise. Helen Mirren is one of the best actresses around. It feels different to have a woman as Prospera but not necessarily inferior. It feels less intense but maybe almost as compelling. The special effects are not the most well made. At times, it looks like a good TV movie. Julie Taymor doesn't have the best CGI talents. The sparse Hawaiian location is more compelling. More than the usual Greek islands, these locations project power and isolation. The other actors try their best but the men don't excel. Djimon Hounsou gives a reasonably beastly performance. Felicity Jones is overshadowed by Helen Mirren. Other than the locations, I don't have anything outstanding to stake my review on.

The Tempest is not the most riveting drama, the larger realization is after all a certain weariness with it. This is given to us as a magician who halfway through the story abandons his powers of illusion, who after conjuring to him the characters and plotting the story of revenge pauses to reflect on the emptiness of the endeavor. It's still powerful then, because we are all Prosperos alone in our island with the thoughts we conjure up to inhabit.In Shakespeare's time, the inspiration for Prospero must have likely come from the scandalous topic of John Dee, the communion with spirits and visions through crystals certainly point at that as well as more broadly the notion of a benign magic. Magic since well before Dee and up to Crowley has tried its best to mask in so much hoopla what other spiritual traditions make clear from the start: that man is an embodied consciousness with the ability to direct that consciousness to vision. Shakespeare no doubt understood this was exactly his own art, a rich and complicated magic of conjured vision in peoples' minds.So if this is to be powerful, you have to adopt a very intricate stance. Show both the power of illusion as vision and, contradictory, the emptiness of it, the fact it is underpinned by an illusory nature of reality. Greenaway masterfully did this in his Prospero film by having Prospero's creation of the play as vision, the vision lush and wonderful, and yet at every turn shown to exist on a stage.Taymor is too earnest to strike this stance, in fact judging by the cinematic fabrics here she seems unsure of what direction to follow. She is an earthy woman so intuitively builds on landscape, volcanic rock under our feet. Pasolini could soar in this approach judging from his mythic films, her approach is too usual and without awe. The magic is also too ordinary. A few movie effects cobbled together in earnest as something to woo simple souls like Trinculo. Compared to the novel richness of Greenaway this feels like discarded Harry Potter work. And the cinematic navigation is without any adventure, as if Taymor didn't believe there was anything for her to discover outside the play, to conjure up in the landscape itself by wandering to it, so she never strays in visual reflection.Mirren conveys the reflection as best she can, but that is all here, too little.