Scenery threatens to overwhelm Liz I

As "Elizabeth: The Golden Age" doles out its CliffsNotes version of history, you may experience motion sickness, like being forced into a waltzing competition after guzzling a fifth of Jack Daniels. Apparently, director Shekhar Kapur never met a superfluous camera move he didn't like. By the time he does yet another spinning swirl around England's "virgin queen," depicted as an iconic Pietà with a heavenly glow from within, you may wonder if Cate Blanchett is playing a triumphant monarch or a shiny new Bentley on a showroom turntable.

To be sure, the movie looks great, it's never boring (the wall-to-wall score precludes the possibility of dozing off) and it doesn't insult the intelligence — not much, anyway.

Nearly a decade after her star-making title role in Kapur's "Elizabeth," Blanchett is now an established actress with a capital A, and she's constantly fascinating here as a forceful Queen Elizabeth I torn by religious strife, political upheaval, threats of assassination and the desperate need for sex.

That's "The Golden Age" in a nutshell: As the great-looking 38-year-old Blanchett plays 52-year-old Elizabeth circa 1585 (a role that begs to be played by 52-year Judy Davis), we're led to believe that hot, unobtainable sex with Sir Walter Raleigh (Clive Owen) is all the childless, unmarried queen really needs to ensure dominance against bowlegged, chipmunk-voiced King Philip II (Jordi Mollá), whose Spanish armada is preparing to strike.

Alas, Raleigh's love is reserved for Elizabeth's faithful lady-in-waiting Bess (Abbie Cornish), while his swashbuckling in the climactic sea battle seems to come swinging in from another movie altogether, suggesting Owen's dazzling potential as the next Errol Flynn. From the looks of it, "Sir Walter: The Golden Age" would be a very enjoyable movie.

To be fair, Liz's golden age offers a fair amount of political intrigue, and as the imprisoned Mary Queen of Scots, Samantha Morton lends the film its greatest emotional impact. She nails her scenes with palpable intensity while Blanchett struts impressively in Oscar-worthy costumes. Morton's performance carries the weight of history that's mostly glossed over in the plot lines, in which Geoffrey Rush (reprising his "Elizabeth" role as the queen's chief adviser) is relegated to little more than dour expressions of disapproval and several Catholic conspirators barely register as human.

And while there's nothing wrong with playing to the cheap seats for popular appeal (making this a very accessible slice of historical meringue), what compelled Kapur to film half the movie through scrims, curtains, screens and arches? How can you appreciate human drama when you're constantly being distracted by the 16th-century equivalent of Architectural Digest?

Jeff Shannon: j.sh@verizon.net