Romeo and Juliet Comparison Essay
Romeo and Juliet Comparison Essay
This essay is going to be talking about the differences in the scenes between the three movies, which we have seen in class, which are:”The 1968 Zeffirelli Film, the 1996 Luhrmann Film and West Side Story.”
If we talk about all three movies, we can say that they may have the same script, but each one looks a little bit different. The first movie which is the 1968 Zeffirelli Film, you can tell that it’s set at the Elizabethan Era at Verona Italy, and all the guys in the movie are wearing tights, and the girls are mostly wearing dresses. Unlike the first movie the other two look really different, the 1996 Luhrmann Film is set up at our days in California and dress with loose clothing like t-shirts and more… and in West Side Story is set at the 50’s in New York and wear tuxedos and shirts, and the girls are wearing mainly dresses.
At all of the three movies, they had two groups that will always fight each other. In the first and the second movie it was the Capulet’s and the Montague’s, but in West Side Story the Capulet’s were the Sharks and the Montague’s were the Jets.
The first fighting scene right at the beginning of the movie looked really differently in each movie. In the Zeffirelli Film, the people were fighting with swords and it was happening in the middle of the court yard. Now in the second movie the guys had guns instead of swords which said on them: “9mm swords”, which I thought was pretty funny, and it was at the gas station, and in West Side Story they were having a fist fight at the playground and around that area.
Everybody always thinks and imagines about how their marriage would look like, but not in those three movies. In those movies everything happens and gets decided in a couple minutes. For example in the Zeffirelli Film, Romeo and Juliet meet at the dance and decide that they need to meet at church on the next day to get married. In the Luhrmann Film Romeo and Juliet do the same thing where they meet at the dance and Romeo tells Juliet to come to the church, to get married. But in West Side Story Tony and Maria pretend to get married through a dance, where they dress up too.
The next scene that is happening and one of the important ones is how, Romeo gets involved in a fight which goes wrong. The most real thing is happening in the Zeffirelli Film, and what’s happening is that Marcutio gets in a sword fight with Tybalt, and Marcutio gets stabbed by mistake, and then Romeo challenges Tybalt into a sword fight with him, and that’s where Tybalt dies. In the Luhrmann Film, Marcutio gets cut with a piece of glass, and Romeo shoots Tybalt for that. The most fair fist fight in the West Side Story turned into a little knife fight, where Riff gets stabbed first, and that’s when Tony comes and stabs Barnard for what he has done to his friend.
The last scene is talking about how Romeo and Juliet die. In the Zeffirelli Film Romeo doesn’t read the letter, where it says what actually happened to Juliet. But when Romeo comes to the tomb he thinks that’s she is dead, and drinks poison which makes Juliet stab herself after that. In the Luhrmann Film, the exact same thing is happening but at the end she uses Romeo’s gun to shoot herself. But In West Side Story as Tony and Maria are going for a hug a guy from the sharks comes out of nowhere and shoots Tony in the heart, but Maria doesn’t die.