Romeo And Juliet Movie Comparison

When people think of Romeo and Juliet, do they think of guns and powerful companies or swords and feuding families? Most people think about the Shakespearean classic from medieval times. However, is Baz Luhrmann’s modern film version really that different? When looking at the Baz Luhrmann version of Romeo and Juliet, the film shows striking similarities and differences to the original in terms of the time period shift, the details, and the visible themes. With the 1996 version, Baz Luhrmann set the time period in the modern days. It allowed for many new opportunities to deviate from the original to provide a new appeal to the age-old story. However, not everything was changed, for example in the famous balcony scene. According to the article

An example is seen in Reviewing Baz Luhrmann Differences by Taryana Odayar where she writes, “The violence of her [Juliet’s] death overshadows its tragic quality in this scene and symbolically taints the sublimity of Romeo and Juliet’s love. Such a gruesome display of bloodshed on stage would certainly have been rejected by conservative Elizabethans.” This gruesome scene however, appeals to the modern society and allows the audience to become more sympathetic to the scenes displayed. Luhrmann did the same thing for other themes to change them slightly as well. Going back to Taryana Odayar’s Reviewing Baz Luhrmann Differences, it states, “A dramatic plot twist in the final scene results in Romeo hastily drinking poison simultaneously with Juliet awakening from her faked death, thereby attributing Romeo’s undoing to his tragic flaw of impetuosity rather than Fate, and drawing sympathy from modern audiences in an instance of cinematic humanism.” These small changes can change how anyone can think on the the story, especially in the more modern era. The infamous story of Romeo and Juliet has been expertly interpreted in both the original play and Baz Luhrmann's movie forms. While they do have their striking differences like making the movie look more modern, to their unchangeable similarities, like their unforgettable themes of love, compassion, and hatred,