What trailer through yonder desktop window breaks? Tis Macbeth and... darn, we’ve quoted the wrong Shakespeare play. Not for the first time, Empire wishes it had paid more attention during English class, although Justin Kurzel’s new adaptation of the Scottish play should fill in some of the blanks. Its new trailer is here.
With Michael Fassbender as Macbeth and Marion Cotillard as his scheme wife, Lady Macbeth, there’s intrigue and politicking afoot from the get-go. In the aftermath of a battle between Scottish clan, Macbeth, a general in King Duncan’s (David Thewlis) army, has an encounter with three witches that sends his mind cogs whirling. Aided and abetted by Lady Mac, he sets about on a ruinous course in which his raw ambition leads to murder, misadventure and a lot of Game Of Thrones-style bloodletting.
On the basis of the trailer, these two clips and Kurzel’s bleak debut feature Snowtown, it’s easy to see how the Aussie was deemed a good fit for the material. His research brief involved discovering what was that time like and how brutal it was. “It reminded me a lot of a Western,” he expands in the press notes, "and of a landscape and atmosphere that felt much more dangerous than I’d ever seen before from adaptations of Macbeth”.
Macbeth has had the big-screen treatment on a few occasions in the past, more notably from Orson Welles (1948), Akira Kurosawa (**Throne Of Blood **in 1957) and Roman Polanski (1971). Find out if Kurzel’s Macbeth will live in that company when it arrives in UK cinemas on October 2 with Paddy Considine, David Thewlis, Sean Harris, Jack Reynor and The Great Gatsby’s Elizabeth Debicki in tow.