Just watched this for the first time and I adore it. The tendency is to take all of Shakespeare's plays seriously as "great literary masterpieces" which is absolutely the exact wrong way to approach his comedies. Just because something is in verse doesn't mean you have to be so decorous about it! Many of his plays were written to appeal to the common man because getting as many Average Joes to part with a half-penny to stand in the gallery as he could in a day was how the company paid the bills. You don't do that with high art pieces, you do it with jokes about farts butts & lady parts, goofy illogical mixups, and making fun of nobility. This interpretation brings that bawdy fun to the 21st century and does a banging job turning ancient Athens into modern Hollyweird.
Is the cinematography groundbreaking? No, but it supplements the storytelling by the actors and design teams very well. The director's choices might not always be traditional but they make sense for the way the story is being told this time around. A suspension of disbelief isn't necessarily required for immersion because we are not being asked to accept a world unlike our curreny reality. We aren't at risk of being taken out of the story by blatant anachronism in a set piece or costume. The choice to stay with the original verse instead of modernizing the script is a vote of confidence from the director and screenwriters in the intelligence of their audience: be happy they're not assuming you need it dumbed down rather than upset modern people in a movie are speaking in iambic pentameter. Theatre has been using verse to establish that "this is a play, you are watching a story" for thousands of years and no one has EVER actually spoken that way on the street! And the Easter eggs of nods to other works through props and inserted asides is FUN. Please can't we have something fun?!
Watch this. Stop taking yourself so seriously, unwad your panties, and let yourself just enjoy this movie for what it is and how it is. Otherwise you're completely missing the point of the original play so why bother with any version of it at all?
