If ever there was a film perfectly poised to spring towards a sequel it was Elizabeth. Nodding at certain visual juxtapositions in the final scenes of The Godfather, Shekhar Kapur's 1998 picture, grubbier than your typical historical epic, ended in the early years of the queen's reign with the Spanish Armada, the colonisation of America and the arrival of Shakespeare all before her, writes Donald Clarke.
ELIZABETH: THE GOLDEN AGE **
Directed by Shekhar Kapur. Starring Cate Blanchett, Geoffrey Rush, Clive Owen, Samantha Morton, Abbie Cornish, Rhys Ifans.12A cert, gen release, 114 min
Dear me. What has gone wrong? Whereas the earlier film avoided pomp for politics, The Golden Age is the most spectacularly vulgar diversion to have come our way since Liberace's funeral. Creaking beneath too many unnecessary digital embellishments, this hyperglycaemic film is so taken up with looking fabulous that it forgets to tell us a lucid story.
Cate Blanchett appears to change her absurdly ornate costumes - did I imagine her wearing a turban made of raspberries and spun sugar? - between each breath and Clive Owen, a wooden Sir Walter Raleigh, is never satisfied with one ship when, thanks to IBM's Virtua-vessel, a million are available.
The picture owes more to Lord of the Rings than it does to The Faerie Queene. Concerning itself mainly with the English response to attempted invasion by the Spanish, it also dances past the chaste romance between Sir Walter and the queen, offers a scribbled sketch of Mary Stuart's demise and says something or other about the bedding in of Protestantism.
Yet all these events take place in a universe so fantastic you half expect flying lizards to burst into the court at any moment. Indeed, the cackling, leathery Spanish, whose unattractive religious fanaticism could allow the film to be read as an argument for ratcheting up the current war on terror, could not look more like Orcs if they had horns and fangs.
The Golden Age is, it must be said, often quite entertaining in its brash preposterousness. That version of the story was, however, carried off with considerably greater flair on television in Blackadder II. "Sir Walter Ooo-what-a-big- ship-I've-got Raleigh," Sir Edmund quipped. So big and so many of them!
