Reviews of Hamlet (1603) and related work
Hamlet (1603
)
William Shakespeare (writer).
Stand, and unfold yourself.
References here: The Bad Sleep Well (1960), Gateway (1977), Black-Adder II (1986), The Lion King (1994), Stora döden – Den värsta katastrof som drabbat Europa (2000).
‣ Hamlet (1948
)
Poorly shot, drab settings and spandex (11 years before it was invented, no less). It was a different era when something this uptight could win Best Picture.
fiction moving picture adaptation
‣ Hamlet (1996)
fiction moving picture adaptation
‣ Scarlet (2025)
Seen in 2026.
A woman named Scarlet takes the place of Hamlet in Shakespeare’s story. She hesitates in trying to kill her uncle Claudius the first time around.
They meet again in an afterlife that is a lot like life. People here must eat, drink, and sleep, precisely as if they were alive. There’s a dragon in the clouds, and an ocean above that, and when you die, your body turns to a leafy sort of ash, but on the plus side, everybody speaks the same language. At a holy mountain, Claudius has gathered warriors from every age of history while he waits for Gertrude to join him.
Scarlet still wants to kill Claudius, but she is alone in her quest until she runs into an EMT named Hijiri. He’s from modern Japan and does not vibe with the biblical setting. Oddly enough, her father is not found, but Scarlet eventually learns his last words. They make her hesitate again.
Scarlet is similar to Hosoda’s previous film, Belle (2021), but its script is a bigger mess. Instead of the Internet and identity formation, the theme of Scarlet is a moral dichotomy between militarism and radical empathy. The supernatural premises are isekai garbage. Hijiri might as well have been hit by Truck-kun for all the backstory he gets.
The Claudius of the afterlife has peaked eyebrows and a monstrous complexion, wears red armour, and lies to his troops from a knock-off of Two Towers’s Hornburg. He is an unusually boring villain. Hijiri (“holy man”) and Scarlet’s father are equally flat and boring as the voices of selfless compassion and universal forgiveness, respectively. Scarlet has a little more range, but still dreams of dancing to a vacuous pop song in front of an adoring mocap crowd. Hosoda relies on audience alignment with a pretty face, great strength of will, and a sob story. The last thing is what he took from Shakespeare. A handful of lines from the original play are repeated, but as a moralistic adaptation produced in a time of international saber-rattling, Scarlet is more-heavy handed than Howl’s Moving Castle (2004), and lighter on everything that makes a film good. A lot of the backgrounds look nice though, and the dragon is cool.
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Note on the names, 1/2: Scarlet’s father’s name is given as Amlet in subtitles and as Amret on a portrait in the background. It’s taken from the name Amleth in the Gesta Danorum, which was Shakespeare’s source for Hamlet, but that doesn’t make it historically accurate. The word “amleth” (amlóði in the chronicle) meant “mad”. It’s like 2 Samuel (ca. 620–500 BCE) referring to one of the old Hebrew kings as “Ish-Boshet”, meaning “man of shame”, instead of using the man’s real name. In the same way that no Hebrew king would ever have named his inheritor “Shameful”, not even a Danish king would have named his son “Whackjob”.
Note on the names, 2/2: As far as I can tell, the modern Danish word for scarlet is skarlagen or purpurrød. The latter can only refer to the colour. The former, though it is used as part of skarlagensfeber, may originally have referred to a type of cloth, popular around the time of the Gesta Danorum, regardless of its colour. I guess we have to imagine that Gertrude and Whackjob picked a name like Skarlagen for their daughter in a misguided reference to her coral-pink hair, and that this name would hypothetically have been adapted to Elizabethan English as “Scarlet”. More likely, Hosoda had a thing for Scarlett O’Hara or some other figure in English-language culture.
Japanese production animation fiction moving picture adaptation