I agreed with a Dana Stevens review. Actually, make that two (Into the Wild). Golden Age was a frightful mess. I attended it with a group of people not very well-versed in the history of the era, and they kept soliciting whispered historical-factoid asides from me to help them through the muddied plots. Stevens' comparisons to Mel Brooks parodies are dead-on. The score,complete with the de rigeur straight-tone treble/soprano solo, and full-throated choruses swelling at moments of "significance," was the exact opposite of what the filmmakers clearly intended--it was underwhelming, and almost distractingly silly. I felt and thought many of the same things as Stevens--for me, scary--including the absurdity of the '40s, swashbuckler staging and set of the naval battle scenes.

I was also disheartened by the portrayal of Elizabeth as an emotionally fragile, ineffectual leader more interested in her love life than leadership. I can't decide if this is an understandable attempt to help humanize a legendary ruler or sad pandering to wrongheaded ideas about female leadership. It was true that Elizabeth had male 'favorites' (with whom she carried on affairs); and that she would often fly into rages if her ladies became pregnant, often clapping their secret husbands in the Tower--however, her rages were by all observers' accounts driven by power/control-needs, paranoia, and narcissism, not by romantic heartache. She clapped many secret husbands (and wives) in the Tower, not just favorites such as Raleigh or Dudley. She was also not as dependent on Walsingham as depicted here (and his character was totally stripped down and denuded of all the intrigue and lust for power surrounding the fabled "Kingmaker").

It was a strange, jumbled assemblage of plots, actors whose chracters were never fully named or explained (necessary in an historical pic, IMO), and, most irritatingly of all--indeed, cheesy, as Stevens would have it--the picture seemed absorbed in a sense of its own grandeur and pageantry. It was almost as though a bunch of set designers, costume makers, props mistresses, and musical composers took over the school and tied up the writer and director while they went to town with the production.

In the end, it was nothing grand; the pageant came to town, but there were no fully realized people on display, only floats.