"O" Review

Throughout my 11 years at Boys’ Latin, I’ve been shown a multitude of movies in the classroom. Everything from “Chicken Run” to “Minions” to sex-ed videos has graced the projectors, or occasionally, those super old TVs 2 feet deep that teachers have to wheel in on big carts. Regardless of the form they’re shown in, the movies have varied drastically in quality from something barely beyond that of Mr. P’s video production class to Oscar award-winning films. Tim Nelson’s “O” sits firmly in the middle of that range. 

The Movie “O” took home $19.2 million on a budget of $5 million and was released 11 days before the 9/11 terrorist attacks, which in hindsight, probably hurt its performance. Regardless of the release date, the $5 million budget is clearly shown in the movie. Most scenes take place in a dorm room or the bizarre aviary that keeps showing up, with the basketball sequences taking up most of the budget. I’ll give the film a pass for this though as Shakespeare's Othello is mostly people sitting in rooms talking. 

I understand that adapting Shakespeare is probably a difficult thing to do, but this film goes in some bizarre directions. Firstly, Othello, or “Odin” as he is known in this film, is a complete asshole to everyone around him after only 1 conversation with Iago’s character “Hugo”. Furthermore, both Odin and Hugo do drugs in this film which I don’t understand as it has no obvious parallels to the play. That’s another big gripe I have with this movie which is that the characters and setting don’t translate that well from the original play. Iago being a high school student that decides to go on an unprompted murder spree, Odin not being punished for assaulting a kid in front of the whole school, and the whole basketball subplot doesn’t make much sense at all especially when looked at as parallels to the book.

What the film did well was depict Iago’s manipulation, the turning of Othello against Desdemona, and the jealousy and pain that Roderigo felt towards everyone else. Remaking a Shakespeare play into a movie can’t be an easy thing. The film will automatically be compared to its source material which, more often than not, is amongst the most famous and critically acclaimed works in history. However, it gives a writer a great base to build a story on and offers them an audience of people willing to pay to come see the movie simply because it is a Shakespeare spin-off. I can also appreciate the fact that movies like that often funnel a new audience into Shakespearian literature who previously hadn’t known of his work.

I had a fun time watching “O”. It was a nice break in the day from other classes and it's one of those movies that can be so bad that it's good. One of the better movies I’ve watched while at BL. 4/10