Shakespeare’s famous “…full of sound and fury, signifying nothing” quote from Macbeth applies to so many movies, it’s easy to fall in the trap of using it to describe pretty much anything. But I really can’t think of a more accurate description for Shekhar Kapur’s Elizabeth: The Golden Age, the sequel to his 1998
Elizabeth. You can find all the extravagant costumes, beautiful scenery, and loud performances you want, but the story is a melodramatic soap opera masquerading as a (blatantly oversimplified) history lesson.

Some of it is entertaining, to be sure. Cate Blanchett is fun to watch bellowing angrily, even though that’s pretty much all she does when she’s not falling helplessly in love with Sir Walter Raleigh, a pirate who has just returned from the Americas after discovering Virginia and naming it after his virgin queen. Played by Clive Owen, Raleigh has it all: shaggy-hair good looks and a rougish charm that turns Queen Elizabeth into some sort of fourteen-year-old girl.

The story splits its time between the micro and macro: on the one hand, there’s Elizabeth’s relationship with Raleigh, which we know from history can’t possibly be consumated since she was famously a virgin her entire life. To throw some sex into the movie, then, Raleigh falls in love with Elizabeth’s favorite lady-in-waiting, Elizabeth Throckmorton (Abbie Cornish) and hides it from the queen. Oh, the drama!

On the other side of the story, the slimy and evil Catholic country of Spain wants to go to war with the free and good-hearted Protestant England. With no reason to declare war, however, they have to wait until Elizabeth sentences Mary Stuart, the captive Queen of the Scots, to beheading after learning of Mary’s involvement in an assassination attempt on Elizabeth. Mary is played by Samantha Morton as somewhere between really creepy and the pure embodiment of evil, and at her death scene takes off her outer robes to reveal a bright red dress. I learn from Wikipedia that red was the traditional color of martyrdom, but combined with her pale skin, she looks like an agent of the devil.

Anyway, war with Spain commences, in which an outmanned and outgunned England defends itself against the Spanish Armada. Like the rest of the movie, the battle scenes are oversimplified to the extreme: we’re told time and time again that the Armada is way better than England’s ships, then we’re told that England is losing, and then suddenly we hear that the good guys won. Since in general, this part is actually all true, I would’ve liked a few more details on how England managed to defeat the Armada without Spain ever reaching English soil, but