Romeo
Essay Preview: Romeo
Report this essay
Baz Luhrman makes the play Romeo and Juliet relevant to the modern audience by changing the text, camera work, set design and sound.
He edited the text so the modern audience could understand the text. The modern audience is more visual than the Shakespearean audience so Baz chopped bits off the text so it would be shorter and get to the fight scenes quicker. He also gave first names to characters so it can be more realistic and people can remember them better than the normal name of “Capulets wife”. The chorus was also repeated three times so people can remember the chorus better and they could understand what it is saying.
The opening scene was doing like a soap opera due to the fact that most people watch soap operas and can understand how the movie is going to look and understand the style that the movie is going. Examples of soap opera style are the title scene, the introduction of characters and the use of camera shots. The movie starts of with the chorus masked as a news report and this sets the scene of the play by illustrating the violence occurring between the two wealthy families, the Montagues and the Capulets.
The title scene shows what will happen later on in the movie and shows if the movie would be good or not. It is sort of a trailer since it shows bits that would be interesting and worth looking at. The audience would be curious to find out what would happen with those scenes. Teenagers would most likely fast forward the movie to get a brief over view of what would happen like what people would do in a book. So the title scene did that for them so it makes the audience more tuned into the movie since it is what they have expected.
The design of the scene was well done. The use of symbols in the film was done with meaning not just random assortments of items. The heel of the shoe was intriguing the audience to know what kind of person would wear an odd looking shoe like that. The continuous lighting of cigarettes means that the person is unfriendly and harsh with people. When he finishes the last line and begins to shoot, he steps onto another match stick and shows that he cannot stop smoking. The symbol of Christ was used throughout the scene and referring back to it throughout the film. The symbol was used on the hilt of the guns, on Tybalts vest, on the back of Abras head and the statue.
The gas station would also be a more believable fight scene than the Franco Zeffirellis version of the play where the two gangs meet in a narrow street.
The sign that says “Add more fuel to