Wonderful Movie

I am only giving this movie a 1 for the great cast, though I can't imagine what any of them were thinking. This movie was horrible

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

The acting in this movie is really good.

I tried to watch this adaptation, but it was just so awful I couldn't torture myself like that. The performances were quite sub-par, with the exception of Ariel. Fonda was way over the top in a role that should be handled with some subtlety. I have studied Shakespeare and seen many adaptations, and this is, by far, the worst one I have ever seen. I have to wonder why on Earth someone made this film. Shakespeare can, and has been, beautifully adapted in many cases. This is not one of them. If you must watch this film, may I suggest a drinking game? Take a drink every time they go off book from the original idea and two drinks every time Fonda overacts. You should be quite drunk in a very short time.

I felt the treatment - being set during the Civil War - was original and refreshing. Peter Fonda was, perhaps, a little bit bland as Prosper/o but still a workmanlike performance.I was a bit disappointed that Gator Man, the Caliban figure, was portrayed as merely a 2D villain, not the somewhat self-pitying Frankenstein's-monster-type Shakespeare paints.

Holy Cow! Don't watch this unless you collect creative travesties.Superficially, this is a stew of the same persiflage usually served up on family TV: kindly voodoo projected as Luke Skywalker's Force; a protective father who goes through painful doubt; innocent pubescence; racial justice; magical help for the North during the Civil War (no lie); leavened with all sorts of minor platitudes. Probably, this is no worse than thousands of slapdash dramas. What makes this interesting, almost hypnotizing, is how it rests on the rough skeleton of Shakespeare's play. It blindly tramples, it innocently debases arguably the best play of arguably the greatest writer in English.Gosh, I cannot even describe the arbitrary transmutations used to fit this simple diorama: Arial a slave, Frederick a Union officer, Prosper a planter who learned voodoo from his slaves... it all hardly matters. One interesting thing: The Tempest was the first great work of literature about the American experience. Almost 400 years later, it still has some of the most profound and complex visions of dealing with non-Europeans, slaves and the forces of nature in the New World. All of that rich content is waiting to be leveraged, dummied down if need be. All is ignored here.It is as if the Hardy Boys were named Tom and Huck and the plot was about petty racial dramas in painting a fence. Wonderous.And Peter Fonda? This was right after the interesting Ulee's Gold, where he actually acted. No sign of that here.

...but it's still an entertaining TV movie. The transposition to the Civil War makes a nice change of pace, and adds a few subtexts (such as Ariel's servitude to Prosper/Prospero) that you might not otherwise see. Thankfully, they didn't try to make it a mini-series: at 90 minutes, it's just about right.