Review: "The Queen"

This movie definitely came out a long time ago, but I watched this on the plane over to Asia (refer to previous post) so I figured I might as well write a review for it. I had a choice of several movies to watch but I chose this one simply because Helen Mirren won an Oscar for her performance. The movie is basically about how the death of Princess Diana affected the British royal family, more specifically, Queen Elizabeth. Mirren definitely deserved her Oscar, she completely humanized Queen Elizabeth and made me feel for her. Most of the time, I see the Queen as some rich old lady leeching off of the British when she doesn't really do much to serve the people. Mirren showed the struggle the Queen has of maintaining her personal traditional values of how the monarchy should behave and the attack of the press and the loss of her people's love. There was no over exaggeration or cheesy melodramatic acting, just the expression of Mirren's eyes in the moment when the Queen was at her lowest point where Tony Blair advised her to lower Buckingham Palace's flag to half mast, return to London, and how her people that she was sorry for Diana's death. There was the look of absolute despair in her eyes for that split second, and then the iron determination to do anything to keep her throne for her son and grandson.
However, there are some negative points to this movie. Its based on events that happened not very long ago so there aren't any surprises in terms of the plot. Most of the teenage crowd will probably find the movie boring even if I found it quite interesting.

Overall rating: 4.5/5