Nobody looked quite how I pictured them.
When Hamlet was lamenting how much greater his father was to his uncle, and how much more attractive... I looked at the two, and I found Hamlet's dad even less attractive than his uncle. I guess Hamlet and his mother have a right to be biased, and there was a different society then.
For another thing, I always imagined Horatio looking like Horatio Hornblower (named after Hamlet's Horatio) from the English TV series based on the Horatio Hornblower books, though in a role more suited to Horatio's friend Archie Kennedy and with some personality traits of them both. (This reminds me of some fanfiction stories where Archie tries to get Horatio Hornblower to read and/or appreciate Archie's favourite play, Hamlet, or where he's quoting "there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy" (Act I scene V). In the TV series Archie is a fan of the theatre, and can quote famous lines, but the idea the Hamlet-related stuff is just fanfiction.) The actor did a good job, and I liked him well enough once he wasn't wide-eyed in terror over the ghost.I didn't picture Ophelia as Kate Winslet. I didn't imagine her as a girl whose fiery nature was being suppressed by her brother and father. I didn't believe that she and Hamlet had done anything... But, it was an interesting take on her character. She says all the same lines, the only thing clearly added was the flashback scenes of them being intimate while people were yelling at her, but she does manage to make the character I pictured as rather meek and docile fiery. I also was surprised at just how frighteningly crazy she seemed when Ophelia went mad. I guess I always had a more light-hearted imagining of crazy Ophelia than the true tragedy that Kate Winslet was able to convey.
The move also put in some other unnecessary sexuality with a whore in Polonius's room, and Hamlet thinking (and you see) King Claudius and the Queen drunkenly falling into bed. This surprised and bothered me.
The players didn't bore me nearly as much as they did when I've read them. I guess Charlton Heston helped.
Even though people spoke really fast (especially Hamlet) there were times during the long speeches that I just wanted whoever it was (Claudius, Polonius, Hamlet, even Laertes once or twice) to just shut up already. I understood that they were being brilliant, but my modern sensibilities were offended by such long monologues. I did enjoy a good number of Hamlet's speeches, even the longer ones, it was just some of them that I got tired of.
I find it interesting that the three young people who die were all portrayed, in the beginning, as very contained people, whether it was self-containment or from pressures from family and society, they were contained. By the end two of them are blatantly acting or are mad, and Laertes doesn't seem all there either. Ophelia seemed truly crazy, but she seemed once more free and more confined and trapped than she had at the beginning. She was free to say what she wanted, and she ran around and did things that people thought were strange, but she still ended up getting physically locked up places and trapped in her own mind. Her death was kind of like a release from all the constraints of various sorts she'd dealt with. Hamlet acts crazy at times, but not very, mostly he seems like he's just done with trying to contain his anger and frustration with people, and as he is not able to take his revenge safely and completely, he takes his anger out on Ophelia, his friends who are spying on him, his mother, and Polonius (at the end it wasn't entirely intentional that way, it still ended up that way). Laertes is just a little crazed with grief and releases it in socially acceptable forms of seeking revenge and mourning melodramatically at Ophelia's grave.
Just a few thoughts.
