Anonymous (2011)

Something very important is to remember when reading my review for Anonymous-I hate Roland Emmerich. I think he’s a pointless filmmaker who makes pointless films for dummies. He has made one film that I have watched and enjoyed, and that film was Independence Day, a film I am scared of re-watching for finding I hate it and my Blu-ray is just taking up empty space now. He has made pointless disaster movie after pointless disaster movie, movies that I just see as big-budgeted script-less globs. The first Emmerich film I ever saw was 2012 when I was eleven. Even then I saw it as dumb, pointless, and stupid. And this is coming from a huge John Cusack fan.

Expanding on the idea that Shakespeare actually never wrote any of his plays, and that it was Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, the film stars Rhys Ifans (de Vere) and Vanessa Redgrave (Queen Elizabeth I), and was a film that suddenly, a few weeks before its release, was unexpectedly pushed down from 3000 or so screens to a measly 265 in the USA, Canada, and the UK, a number that is much smaller than it looks. The film was re-created with some very good CGI technology that re-created the entire atmosphere of old England. Honestly, the best thing about this film is the atmosphere, how it is created, how the costumes look, and how the performances are, this entire film just feels like old England from the first frame. But then you hear the first lines, and then the plot kicks in. It states that de Vere was the actual writer of the plays, because of the class system that everybody was so deathly afraid of back then (I am so happy I live in the 21st Century), and with the help of Ben Johnson (Sebastian Armesto, who performs as one of the few truly likable characters in the film), puts the plays on an often-drunken actor named William Shakespeare (Rafe Spall). I still really don’t know how Queen Elizabeth fits into the main plot of the story, she really seems to function as a side-plot, but that seems to not be terribly important here.

As both a Shakespeare fan and as a film fan, this movie is just nearly insulting. The film is extremely convoluted in its time-jumping script, and with that, the boring lines that go along with it. And putting aside my personal feelings on how the subject matter lives, what I’m concerned with is how it’s portrayed. Shakespeare is the foundation of how most films today are made, and I will appreciate him forever for that, and seeing him so ignorantly written here seems both ironic and offensive. But really, there’s nothing to be angry about here. There’s nothing to care about here. Anonymous just ends up being a lazy and convoluted drama that had a very good costume design, a very good set design, some good actors, and a script that seemed like someone threw words at a wall and picked out sentences.
3.5/10