What Elizabeth: The Golden Age finally lacks is something its subject never lacked: a sense of majesty.
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10/12/07
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Elizabeth: The Golden Age (2007)
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Reviews Counted:162
Fresh:55
Rotten:107
Average Rating:5.1/10
Consensus: This sequel is full of lavish costumes and elaborate sets, but lacks the heart and creativity of the original Elizabeth
Theatrical Release:Oct 12, 2007 Wide
Box Office: $16,264,475
Synopsis: Reprising the roles they originated in seven-time Academy AwardŽ-nominated Elizabeth, Cate Blanchett and Geoffrey Rush return for a gripping historical thriller laced with treachery and... [More]
Starring: Cate Blanchett, Geoffrey Rush, Clive Owen, Rhys Ifans
Director: Shekhar Kapur
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Reviews for Elizabeth: The Golden Age
Top CriticThe Golden Age feels like two movies: one a bodice-ripping romance, the other a study in statecraft and power. But these strands, one private, one public, come together in the title character and the balancing act she must master.
10/12/07
Top CriticIt dances through history, making us feel as though such spectacles as the defeat of the Spanish Armada took place in the course of an afternoon, and that what really mattered was what everyone was wearing at the time.
10/12/07
It is a silly film about serious matters, challenged by a multiple-personality disorder -- multiple multiple-personality disorders, in fact -- but more or less saved from pure nonsense by Blanchett.
10/12/07
Top CriticThere are scenes where the costumes are so sumptuous, the sets so vast, the music so insistent, that we lose sight of the humans behind the dazzle of the production.
10/12/07
Top CriticThose of us who looked forward to this second installment of a planned trilogy may now dread the third.
10/12/07
Where's the political sophistication that made the first movie slightly more interesting? That was a decent game of chess. The Golden Age is checkers.
10/12/07
Top CriticNothing more than a splashy, eclectic pageant complete with barge rides, banquets, indoor forests of wigs, medieval dancers that look like modern mimes and dialogue that makes you wish everyone would shut up.
10/12/07
Despite good performances all around, particularly the ever-brilliant Blanchett, Elizabeth: The Golden Age is a gilded ornament, speculative and uninterested in much besides this queen's matters of heart.
10/12/07
Elizabeth: The Golden Age is a kitsch extravaganza aquiver with trembling bosoms, booming guns and wild energy.
10/12/07
A sequel in which the Virgin Queen struggles to hold on to power in a time of great religious violence and personal challenges.
10/12/07
As insistent on its emotional grandiosity as it is completely meaningless.
10/12/07
Nobody has [Blanchett's] back this time, as Kapur's leaden pacing and the script's soap-opera touches undercut Elizabeth's glory.
10/12/07
The Golden Age recycles much of the same basic material without offering any real insight into the woman or the times in which she lived
10/12/07
Imagine The Sopranos made by NBC. Imagine Braveheart brought to you by The History Channel. Imagine Disney's South Park. That's what a PG-13 Elizabeth is like.
10/12/07
...a feast for the eyes and a portrait of a leader who has to rely as much on herself as anyone else when her nation is under attack.
10/12/07
Through the miracle of modern technology, the film achieves alchemy in reverse, turning historical gold into contemporary lead.
10/12/07
Top CriticA lurid sort of Christopher Hitchens vision of history pervades Elizabeth: The Golden Age … How is it possible that this orgy of anti-Catholicism has been all but ignored by critics?
10/12/07
Playing fast and loose with the facts, and generating little big picture meaning, Elizabeth: The Golden Age, stands as a series of individual court intrigues that fail to add up to any great epiphany.
10/11/07
Golden Age rides off the rails, taking the legend of Elizabeth to the next level of mythology. Frankly, the acceleration is bliss.
10/11/07
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