Holy Cow! Don't watch this unless you collect creative travesties.
Superficially, this is a stew of the same persiflage usually served up on family TV: kindly voodoo projected as Luke Skywalker's Force; a protective father who goes through painful doubt; innocent pubescence; racial justice; magical help for the North during the Civil War (no lie); leavened with all sorts of minor platitudes.
Probably, this is no worse than thousands of slapdash dramas. What makes this interesting, almost hypnotizing, is how it rests on the rough skeleton of Shakespeare's play. It blindly tramples, it innocently debases arguably the best play of arguably the greatest writer in English.
Gosh, I cannot even describe the arbitrary transmutations used to fit this simple diorama: Arial a slave, Frederick a Union officer, Prosper a planter who learned voodoo from his slaves... it all hardly matters. One interesting thing: The Tempest was the first great work of literature about the American experience. Almost 400 years later, it still has some of the most profound and complex visions of dealing with non-Europeans, slaves and the forces of nature in the New World. All of that rich content is waiting to be leveraged, dummied down if need be. All is ignored here.
It is as if the Hardy Boys were named Tom and Huck and the plot was about petty racial dramas in painting a fence. Wonderous.
And Peter Fonda? This was right after the interesting Ulee's Gold, where he actually acted. No sign of that here.
