Sadly many aspects of this production do not sit well in 2024. King James... well, let's make him borderline homosexual, effeminate, foppish... just like Mel Gibson's Edward II, so we can mock and laugh at him as less than a 'real man'. Really? Let's have a persecuted minority (and for persecuted read: once a majority, who through their brutal suppression and unflinching religious laws, set by an unelected regime many miles and many countries away, who alienated a people into what was effectively a rising against the Catholic Church's inflexibility, and who agitated, disrupted and rebelled against the majority so many times that they had to be punished, but ooohhh that's soooo unfair) who are intent on bombing and murdering the country back into that same church and claiming that same punishment and repression not as the just rewards of their actions but as an unjust and undeserved state of affairs which comes to justify their actions. A real chicken and egg scenario - which came first, the Catholic agitation, or the penalty? We rise, we rebel, we get punished, then because we're punished, we rise again, and rebel again, and get punished more... and then suffer under the evil regime which insults women, invades privacy, and rides roughshod over their feelings so that we now clearly know which side to support and which to boo. Effectively we have the 18th century version of William Wallace, who really just wants a family life and to be left to worship in peace... but those evil English through their brutality make him a fanatic willing to die for his cause. Haven't we been here before? Poor Braveheart... I was waiting for the first instance of prima nocta. This was well-shot, good attention to period detail, but oh so cliched. The English were cruel but inept, unfeeling - did any of them even have wives? - and eventually had to rely on the Spanish to betray the Catholic cause, and it was all because Cecil wanted Catesby's land. I enjoyed it, but maybe some day we'll see a production where the terrorists are not all unwilling victims, but the product of their own actions, and who act out of hate - just as in the real world.
