A Midsummer Night's Dream Comparative Essay

The 1999 film adaptation of a Midsummer’s Night's Dream had in many ways a lot to live up to. The same year it was released a film by the name of Shakespeare in love was receiving it’s undeserved Best Picture Oscar (more on that in another essay!) at the 71st Academy awards. It was, in my opinion, a revival of the Shakespeare genre that was lacking in cinema since the days of the Lord Laurence Olivier. But despite the film's star power, it did not live up to Shakespeare in love or Olivier’s performances but that’s not the point of this essay. The point of this essay is this; that the changes made were not an ostentatious show of the film's high budget, but required changes that made the story better and more suited for our time.

Creating

The places were people look most to find a wrong thing is in the characters. Like in Harry potter when fans started pointing out about Harry’s eye colour or Dudley’s hair were wrong. It always seems like they alter the character to the film. This is seen through out A Midsummer Night’s Dream with all 5 main characters. With Bottom it’s a change of his attitude or with Helena it’s a change of her description. So instead of you having to go tediously watch the movie, just let me do all the work and tell you how different Bottom and Helena are in the movie than they are in the book and why that’s a good thing. Right from the start with Bottom the Weaver, you can tell that he is an interesting man. He has a very egotistical and overbearing personality. However in the book it is never seen to be anything else really, except a donkey of course. But in the film we got to see a little a more of Bottom. The screenwriters did an excellent job in demonstrating that Bottom has something none of us expected, a family with a wife. Though seen in his first scene wooing two young women, later on you see Bottom looking very affectionately at his wife. This is a very good addition by the director because it adds depth to, in my opinion a shallow character only there for comic relief. Other than Bottom I feel that the way Helena was portrayed was very interesting. Despite the line, Through Athens I am thought as fair (1.1.233), I always had the impression of Helena and Demetrius being the ugly pair of lovers. So when I saw the movie I thought, why is Helena not ugly! This was a good move by the director because if she was ugly, I think that the audience wouldn’t be routing for her as much as we were in this movie. Though Helena did look a little bit crazy, one could tell that her character was crazy for love. Making Helena