The Tudors: The Final Season
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Actor: Anthony Brophy, Henry Cavill, James Frain, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Sarah BolgerBrand: Paramount
Writer: Michael Hirst
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); Spanish (Original Language); Spanish (Dubbed)
Format: AC-3, Box set, Color, Dolby, Dubbed, DVD, NTSC, Widescreen
Picture Format: 2.35:1
Running Time: 533 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2010-10-12
Audience Rating: Unrated
Studio: Showtime / Paramount
Product features:
- Condition: New
- Format: DVD
- AC-3; Box set; Color; Dolby; Dubbed; DVD; Widescreen; NTSC
DVD Reviews of The Tudors: The Final Season
DVD Review: Henry VIII casting and script totally bogus and trite.
Summary: 1 Stars
I watched some of each episode but the triteness of the script soon bored me silly. Guess I've been reading too much about his life and am too much of a purist. Also some historical facts have been twisted. But that was bad enough. But how many viewers could accept this series as anything but bogus. The dialogue was inane and vulgar. Jonathan Rhys-Williams, who should have played a page or a yong lover of Katherine Howard, certainly not Great Harry himself, was distracting. He was even worse a Henry VIII than Eric Bana (Troy's dark, swarthy Hector!) in "The Other Boleyn Girl."
I realize actors do play historical characters who do not always resemble the parts they play(e.g., Colin Farrell's 5'10" to Alexander's 5'6" or 5'7")and Mel Gibson (about 5'11" while William Wallace was at least 6'5") but both had substance and even Mel was powerful (Perhaps Wallace himself had been mythologized as a giant so in Braveheart they solved it by having someone in the ranks saying, "We thought you were at least 7 feet tall!" and Mel replying, "But I am William Wallace," and you believed him because he exuded the power. But in The Tudors, they cast this little dude, Jonathan Rhys-Williams, dark, wiry, and everyone towered over him. All of the ladies were almost his height. He lacked power, majesty, and substance, and he was given bad script to make him sound even less kingly than he looked.
Because if nothing else, at all phases of his life, Henry VIII was every inch a king. In his adult youth and up to when he MET Anne Boleyn, Henry VIII was a magnificent monarch iin the prime of his vigour at 6'3" (an unusual height for any man back in the 1500s) with a magnificent physique, lithe and powerful. Everyone looked up to--and up at--him. He was intimidating, while Rhys-Williams was a pipsqueak, and a vulgar little bully whom everyone looked down at while he was screaming back up at them more, acting like a spoiled child than a king. He was so bogus that no one could have taken Henry VIII seriously had HE really come across like that. The real Henry VIII was very fair and ruddy, had red-gold hair and beard in his youth and lost most of his hair (and had gained a lot of weight) years later by the time he MARRIED Anne Boleyn.
TV's Anne Boleyn was pretty but had pale fish eyes. The real Anne had black eyes and was very thin and dark and very charismatic. TV's Anne B. was by turns listless and demanding, no middle ground. Katherine of Aragon was also woefully miscast. The real Katherine was very short, had aged prematurely, and had got rather chunky in about 10 years. In fact, they were all too "The Real Doomed Wives of London" to me. These TV wives are all too gorgeous, even Anne of Cleves, who was actually reportedly so unappealing that the still-virile Henry wouldn't consummate his marriage with her. And even Wolsey (Sam Neill!?) was too good looking to be Wolsey, Jeez! What were they thinking? All were miscast. Sam Neill acted a good Wolsey (another reason I gave it one star), if you closed your eyes and pictured him as fat as a pig by the time he was kicked out of office.
Also too many obscenity-bombs were thrown about. Why do people have to be so vulgar? We hear enough of it in real life, and now it is de rigueur to lace every conversation in films with dirt and smut. It is distracting to a viewer when that is done too much, and it is why I can't bear to watch too many movies nowadays. Honesly, I am not being a prude. I can appreciate obscenities--when they are reserved for very special occasions. Once obscenties and perversities are permitted, they abused to distraction.
Finally, Henry VIII, by the time he divorced Katherine Howard, weighed 28 stone and his leg was ulcerated and smelly. A stone equals 14 pounds, which totaled a whopping 392 pounds at the time of his death. He was a glutton and nearly an invalid due to his leg pain.
Rhys-Williams is a good actor but unsuitably and woefully miscast as Henry VIII. To cast someone in a whole series and not have him at least show some Henrician blubber does old Harry a disservice. J. R-W would havea made a great Mark Smeaton or Thomas Culpepper. I gave it one star because of a) Sam Neill, 2) it was very colorful, and 3) some of the actual history was accurate. I did watch about one-third of each episode, then I switched the channel to something more interesting: CNN.
Description of The Tudors: The Final Season
The Tudors presents the rarely dramatized, tumultuous early years of King Henry VIII?s nearly 40 year, omnipotent reign (1509-1547). In addition to his famous female consorts and 20+ year marriage to Catherine of Aragon to the infamous dalliance with Anne Boleyn, the series delves in to Henry?s most notable political relationship and the deconstruction of the Roman Catholic Church in England.Henry VIII is not in a very good humor in the final season of The Tudors, despite the fact that much of England and Western Europe has been bent to his will. But that means only that this season of The Tudors is just as captivating and engrossing as the three preceding it. By this time, King Henry (the always excellent Jonathan Rhys Meyers) is restive, facing ongoing rebellion in the north of England, and fissures in his own family and among his own children. Well, that's what you get when you have multiple children from different wives, and new declarations of who's the rightful heir and who's banished to the Tower. Season four focuses on Henry's declining health--and while Rhys Meyers has been padded a bit in a nod to reality, he still looks handsome and fetching, nothing like the squat, obese martinet depicted in official royal portraits. This season of The Tudors also focuses on King Henry's final two wives, and the actors who play them are among the best thing in the entire season. Young vixen Catherine Howard (Tamzin Merchant) probably never stood a chance, and was outwitted in court and played like a pawn by the king's advisers. Ultimately, Howard pays the ultimate price for having had the indecency to have had a bit of a past well before she wed the king. Enter wife No. 6, Catherine Parr (the truly regal Joely Richardson), who is perhaps finally the king's match intellectually and politically. Twice widowed when she captured the eye of the king at age 31, Parr was originally asked to marry by Thomas Seymour (Andrew McNair), the brother of the king's earlier wife Jane Seymour. But when King Henry proposed, Parr agrees--and, because of her earnest intellectual curiosity and embracing of the new Church of England, sets in motion the final dramas of Henry's life. The conniving and plotting are never over for The Tudors, though King Henry, after a pretty good run, finally meets his end. The Tudors is so satisfying, however, that one wishes it would continue and follow the lives of Henry's daughters, Mary and Elizabeth. There could be many more entrancing years of history writ large. The Tudors: The Final Season includes several episodes from other Showtime series, including United States of Tara, Dexter, and Episodes, but alas, no extras related specifically to The Tudors. --A.T. Hurley
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