“These violent delights have violent ends…” (Friar Laurence). This quote very well sums up the ups and downs of Shakespeare's famous play, Romeo and Juliet. In this play, Two families, The montagues and the Capulets are in a relentless struggle against each other. Through this feud, Romeo Montague and Juliet Capulet fall deeply in love but have to conceal it from their feuding parents. This issue leads to them both taking their own lives. This play has had an enormous amount of film and literary adaptations. Two of these film adaptations are, Franco Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet and Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet. Both of these films were excellently produced and were nominated for many academy awards. While both of these movies have the same story and plot, they varied greatly on the setting and how the characters were portrayed. …show more content…
One of the more obvious ones was the use of the same story and major character development. Both the directors stayed true to Shakespeare's original vision and all the characters who were essential to the story. Another similarity is both of the films used the same lines, taken directly from the play script. One very prominent example of this is in the beginning they both begin with the narrator speaking the prologue just as it is in Romeo and Juliet. Another similarity is how both adaptations heavily modified or completely left out selected scenes from the play. Some of these scenes was where Romeo kills Paris in the Capulet Vault. This scene was not shown in either of the films. Another similarity is the genuine love that you feel between both Romeo and Juliet. It is felt much stronger in the films, as you can see it in their faces, than in the play. Both of these adaptations display large commonalities between them that add very much emotion and nostalgia to both of the