A Critical Review of Baz Luhrmann’s
Romeo and Juliet
By general consensus the original and world’s greatest epic concerning love, Romeo and Juliet is presented here by Baz Luhrmann in a thoroughly modern and accessible format, whilst retaining the original plot and utilising some of the world’s best-known text. I must admit that, before I viewed this film, I approached it with a not insignificant amount of trepidation. I myself am not a great fan of the original tale, as I find it to have become predictable and unrealistic; a victim of it’s own success. I was pleasantly surprised to find, then, that Luhrmann has managed not only to keep mainly true to the plot, but has also made the film version exciting and impossible to stop watching.
Luhrmann’s film changes the setting of Shakespeare’s medieval, quaint town, Verona, to a typically troubled modern-day city, Verona Beach, replete with drugs, gangs, violent crime and corruption. This may sound like an unlikely setting for a tale of love, but actually turns out to be well able to accommodate the events of the plot, and, when coupled with Luhrmann’s interpretations of the character, serves only to make the film convincingly believable. Capulet and Montague appear to be business-men, but all we know for certain is that they hold positions of power in the city, the head of each family operating from their own sizable sky-scraper emblazoned with the family name and glowering at the other over the tops of the other city buildings. The other family members in each of the feuding patriarchies run competing street gangs that frequently and publicly clash.
