Wow... that person who gave it "zero stars out of ****" is a little confused... though not without entertainment value. His comment "Shakespeare would have been apalled" is laughable. why? Because most of his whining was about the plot itself. Does he not realize that Shakespeare WROTE the play A Midsummer Night's Dream, and that that makers of the movie followed the original play TO THE WORD, except for a few dialogue cuts that didn't affect plot? And then he went on to whine about how frivolous and silly the plot is...
you know what? All of Shakespeare's comedy plots are silly and frivolous. That's the point. Remember, in his time, he wasn't an intellectual mastermind... he was an entertainer for the masses. He gave the playgoers what they wanted in his plays, whether comedy, tragedy, or history- and what they wanted was love, mistaken identity, gratuitous violence, a few laughs, and to be entertained. Yes, he was a great playwright. One of the first, in fact, to really give changeability to his characters. Most writers of his time used purely stock characters. Good guys, bad guys, drunk guys, slutty chicks, virtuous chicks, idiots, smart guys... but never 3-dimensional characters. This is what Shakespeare changed. He created 3-D, CHANGEABLE characters.
And don't start on "Oh, you are being shallow". Shakespeare DID put a lot of deeper meanings and metaphore into his plays- but that DID come secondary to entertainment. And even his great plays like Hamlet and Macbeth, with some serious psychological "WTF???" going on, were pretty contrived. I mean, the end of Hamlet involves four dead bodies on the stage, mostly due to mix ups (Hamlet gets stabbed by Laertes' poisoned sword, they keep fighting and manage to switch swords, Laertes gets stabbed with his OWN sword, the queen drinks the poisoned wine meant for Hamlet, then warns him, and he stabs the king AND makes him drink the poisoned wine. Nevermind Ophelia's previous suicide because Hamlet was pretending to be insane, Polonius getting stabbed by Hamlet because Hamlet thought he was the evil king, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern dying in Hamlet's place when they were sent to get him killed, and of course, the death of Hamlet's own father by having poison poured in his ear) So don't start bashing the filmmakers. You said the only good thing they did was the atmosphere... but really, that's all that was left up to them- the presentation. The play was already written, the characters already created, the plot already silly and Chick Flick-y. Sorry. That idiotic "Shakespeare would be apalled" thing just bothers me. I mean, he wrote the fricking thing. So, the only conclusion I can draw from this inane and snooty review is that, like many others, the complexity of the play and its many subplots confused the hell out of you (May I say something about attention spans here??), so you tried to turn it around and blame it on someone else because you're too much of a dolt to figure out what's going on.
Ok, having ranted- I'll make this brief. A Midsummer Night's Dream is like a comedy-chick flick with the added advantage of a cool atmosphere and Shakespeare's poetic dialogue. It's a funny romantic comedic fantasy. If you like that sort of thing, see it. If you don't, then don't. And for God's sake, if you can't understand that dialogue, don't blame it on the filmmakers. There ARE people out there who DO understand it, you know.
