Queen Cleopatra is a Netflix documentary directed by Tina Gharavi and Victoria Adeola Thomas, starring Adele James, Craig Russell and Jada Pinkett Smith.
Do you remember the Joseph L. Mankiewicz movie, Cleopatra, starring Elisabeth Taylor? Well, absolutely nothing to do with it.
A documentary series that follows in the footsteps of African Queens: Njinga in its treatment and approach to dramatized documentary.
About the series
To say it with (much) subtlety: the series is not a ten, nor a seven… from there, let’s go down and let everyone places it where they want. A series that undoubtedly lacks the means to recreate the grandeur of Ancient Egypt and that, without the actors or the imagination of I, Claudius (the mythical BBC series) pretends to do something similar, but with not enough resources for the choice of a subject so… grandiose.
And with such a brutal and imperial character to be portrayed in a series that fails to convey the greatness or power of this woman.
We are not going to go into the choice of the actress, especially in the controversy. Adele James does not fit into a series that simply does not work due to lack of means and lack of aesthetic proposals.
It is not that you need a billion dollars to make a Cleopatra as it deserves, but in the absence of those 999 million, you must put imagination, staging, interpretation, editing and, above all, a strong vision to try to compensate for the shortcomings and not to render a poor production that certainly doesn’t live up to the theme.
A series that reminds me of those documentaries they used to show us in class when, precisely, they didn’t want to teach.
Well, let’s be fair: those were much better.
Release date
Mai 10, 2023
