2026

Titus [1999]

Sam Binder

29 Mar 2026 — 2 min read

Frustratingly, my CMS, Ghost, decided to throw out my first draft of this. It was better written but they were unable to recover it. So, once more from the top, but with expedience and, unfortunately, brevity: I did not know how dead-on I was last week, saying that this would be the weird one. Welcome back to My Year of Shakespeare, this week we are watching Julie Taymor's Titus, a movie that lost $15 million dollars at the box office and somehow ended zero careers in the process.

I feel like anything I write in synopsis is going to fail to describing the surreal approaches this film takes; like it's source material, it does not place itself in time — Shakespeare set Titus Andronicus in a sort of aggregated post-Octavian Rome — but it also incorporates modernities like wolf-headed motorcycles among the swords, sandals, breastplates and bathhouses.

This was director Julie Taymor's first film; she previously directed the Lion King stage show, for which she won three Tony awards, for Best Musical, Best Direction of a Musical, and Best Costume Design. That experience is fully on display, many of the sets, costumes, etc are absolutely wild. This movie is a visual feast and not in the usual "CGI and Good Enough Lighting" sense in which that phrase seems to be thrown around nowadays.

Practical Effects! We used to Actually Do The Thing in movies!

The performances in this are intense; I think Hopkins is the only one turning in a more stoic performance so that everyone else can get feral chewing the scenery. Alan Cumming, Jessica Lange, and Matthew Rhys are unhinged. It's beautiful.

Ultimately, it does adapt Titus Andronicus faithfully if with bonus anachronisms, so if a rape-revenge plot is no-go for you, or if you'd rather have more character depth than "yeah Aaron the Moor? dude's crazy", you'll need to look elsewhere. But if you want to see a very maximalist version of the play, done with mostly practical effects, it's here. It's good.