Throughout the centuries, thousands of productions of Shakespeare’s play The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet have taken place. With the development of cinema, a film adaptation was guaranteed to happen. 

As it turns out, there are quite a few film adaptations of the time-worn story. Many high schoolers have to sit through one or two every year, as the play is studied ad nauseam in almost every ninth grade English class. 

Some adaptations are more or less faithful, preserving the original play’s dialogue and the setting of Verona, Italy. Others do something interesting with the concept of two star-crossed lovers. In the TV show Gilmore Girls, one episode shows various students putting on productions that make Romeo and Juliet cavepeople or mobsters. Unfortunately, the main characters opt for keeping their version Elizabethan.

Regardless of the setting, the plot usually keeps its basic ingredients: two teens from rival families fall in love, and it doesn’t end well. How many variables can be changed before it stops being Romeo and Juliet, and which version is the most interesting? Before Valentine’s Day, I watched several film adaptations to find out.

I started off with Franco Zeffirelli’s 1968 iteration. It’s very accurate to Shakespeare’s writing and keeps the original setting—but a lot of the original lines were cut. Every other version of Romeo and Juliet I watched after this would deviate from this in some way. 

It is for this reason that I suspect most high schoolers probably won’t be enthused about watching this film. After all, it’s exactly the same as the play they’ve had to parse and pore over for an entire unit of English class. 

After that, I watched Baz Luhrmann’s polarizing 1996 movie Romeo + Juliet. While this film preserves the original play’s dialogue and characters, its decision to set the scene in fair Verona Beach, California circa 1996 annoys purists to this day. 

However, I am a fan of the ’90s setting. The sets and costume design are iconic for a reason. The scene where Romeo (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Juliet (Claire Danes) first see each other through a fish tank remains seared into my memory. So does the colorful array of Hawaiian shirts seen throughout the runtime.

I admit that I can see why this film put off critics like Roger Ebert. It’s faithful to the original Shakespeare and visually appealing, but at many points it uses mise-en-scène as a crutch. 

No amount of neon and tropical fish could prevent the editing and performances from looking chaotic and drug-fueled. The hammy acting near the end doesn’t help matters. 

The aforementioned purists may disagree with me for this, but Romeo + Juliet preserves almost everything from the original script, unlike Zeffirelli’s version. It’s a straightforward adaptation that only strays from the play in aesthetics. I had to find something more different.

Steven Spielberg’s 2021 remake of West Side Story turned out to fit that category. It’s a musical set in 1950s New York. Instead of the Montagues and Capulets, the warring groups are two gangs called the Jets and the Sharks. The Jets are white and resentful of the Sharks, who are Puerto Rican immigrants.

The Romeo of the story is a former Jet named Tony (Ansel Elgort), and the Juliet analogue is Maria (Rachel Zegler), the younger sister of a Shark. They both quickly fall in love at a dance. This is because the story’s major beats match the original Romeo and Juliet very closely. I’m inclined to view such instant love with skepticism, even with the actors’ infectious energy.

Of course, the original play also gave the two leads a short timeframe to fall in love. But one would think that Spielberg would at least let Tony and Maria reach the talking stage before professing their undying love for one another. Everything happens in two days, which is more unbelievable than seeing New York gangs do spontaneous musical numbers. 

That’s right: musical numbers. I’m not always a fan of people suddenly singing and dancing, but the songs weren’t bad. I preferred the choreography, though.  

I thought West Side Story was pretty good, although I didn’t much like Elgort as Tony. Then again, even Leonardo Dicaprio struggled to convey Romeo’s sorrow after Juliet’s apparent death. Most of the other actors in West Side Story were great.

I’m not Puerto Rican, so I can’t comment on how accurate the representation was. It’s a little disappointing that the actress who plays Maria isn’t Puerto Rican, although she did a great job. I think the film would have also benefited from English subtitles for Spanish dialogue and vice versa.

This movie keeps the play’s depressing ending, with a slight change. It felt very fast, but still sad. It was sometimes tricky to discern what tone certain scenes were intended to have. The music generally sounded cheerful, but the themes were dark. 

It’s not a bad movie, but maybe I wasn’t in the right mindset to fully appreciate it. The visuals were beautiful, but I still focused on the proliferation of lens flares. And when the ending rolled around, I felt empty inside. It’s objectively good, but just not my thing.

West Side Story makes a lot of changes to the original story, but its plot points are 100% recognizable as Romeo and Juliet. It even finds ways to work in some of Shakespeare’s lines. What if there was a movie that used Romeo and Juliet as a point of departure?

That question turned out to have an answer, in the form of Warm Bodies. In this movie, a guy whose name probably began with R (Nicholas Hoult) meets a girl named Julie (Teresa Palmer). This time, they can’t be together because he’s a zombie and she’s a human.

The odds are against R. Even if he weren’t a walking cadaver who ate Julie’s boyfriend, he would still be an awkward, presumably teenage boy. He has an entertaining inner monologue, but Julie doesn’t know that. As the story goes on, however, he finds it easier to do things like talk, contain his appetite, and move quickly. 

Warm Bodies does something unique with zombies. They’re more than just a metaphor for consumerism. Many of them feel trapped in their dead bodies. I think zombies being able to talk defeats the purpose of them being zombies, though. This movie doesn’t always play by its own rules when it comes to the undead.

There are also some absolutely ridiculous skeleton monsters. The way they move reminds me of the aliens in the “Blue (Da Ba Dee)” music video. It’s hilarious. They provided some action to go with the themes, along with a cathartic snicker every time they started to walk. 

Overall, this movie is enjoyable. It’s very cheesy, but it’s also self-aware and funny. Nicholas Hoult is a little too good at playing a zombie, though. I started to wonder if the director got one to infect him. 

However, one question remains: is this really Romeo and Juliet? There are superficial similarities like the characters’ names and a balcony scene, but other than that it’s a completely different story. It follows the structure of a standard rom-com, but with zombies. The ending is also very different. 

After some pondering, I decided to put it in the category of “inspired by Romeo and Juliet” rather than “an adaptation of Romeo and Juliet.” No English teacher would show this to their students, because it has so little in common with Shakespeare’s play. (Not that it’s a bad thing, of course.)

This led me to the final boss. The one Romeo and Juliet to rule them all. The mothership of unusual Romeo and Juliet adaptations. Shakespeare himself would cower in fear if he saw the leading man’s rubbery CGI face. Warm Bodies had provided an energy boost, but I was still tired and beaten after my week of watching the same story over and over. But I had to do it. There was no other way to complete my article.

That’s right. I watched Gnomeo and Juliet.

It was an unusual experience. The movie starts with an announcement by a small garden gnome, who informs the audience that the following story has been told many times. He attempts to read Shakespeare’s prologue (“Two households,” etc.), but is rudely interrupted.

This attitude towards Romeo and Juliet permeates the film as a whole. When Gnomeo (James McAvoy) meets a sentient statue of William Shakespeare, the statue tells him about his play’s tragic ending. “It’s rubbish!” Gnomeo says, before leaving to embroil himself in new shenanigans. 

The ending avoids the tragedy in lieu of a garden gnome dance party set to Elton John’s music. By the time the credits rolled, I was questioning every single one of my life decisions leading up to that moment. This is a Romeo and Juliet adaptation that seems to dislike its source. Maybe it’s just British humor.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. The film is set in two gardens in Stratford-upon-Avon, England. Each garden has an assortment of sentient garden gnomes and other such decorations. Juliet (Emily Blunt) feels trapped in her garden, at least until she meets Gnomeo. They can’t be together because she has a red hat and he has a blue hat.

Do any of those details truly matter? Should I explain the significance of a talkative plastic flamingo? Shall I enumerate the director’s stabs at metacommentary? Perhaps I’ll comment on the inclusion of legends like Dame Maggie Smith, Ozzy Osbourne, Dolly Parton, and Sir Patrick Stewart to the cast. Would any of it lend some deeper meaning to the concept of rural gnome strife?

Gnomeo and Juliet is so frequently bizarre that it made me question my grasp on reality, particularly when any of its eccentricities unfolded. Maybe I found the fake ad for a lawnmower featuring a bellowing Hulk Hogan genuinely funny. Or maybe I was so numb to the strangeness that I could do nothing but laugh hollowly. 

Warm Bodies could be called a zom-com. Gnomeo and Juliet is a gnom-com. Both films eliminate the sad ending, and thus the fidelity to Romeo and Juliet– a play that is, first and foremost, a tragedy.

I understand why a children’s movie that is largely a pastiche couldn’t include a double suicide at the end. Ditto for a lighthearted YA romance. It still made me think about whether making the ending of Romeo and Juliet happy is a good narrative choice.

This line of questioning eventually evolved into: why, out of all of Shakespeare’s plays, does Romeo and Juliet persist so strongly in popular culture? Part of it is probably because of its simplicity. Another factor could be that people like repetition in media. If a story works, why not do it again?

This isn’t a bad thing in itself. Surprisingly, Shakespeare wasn’t the one who came up with the story for Romeo and Juliet. He adapted it from Arthur Brooke’s poem The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet, which was in turn taken from a pre-existing story. Also, the concept of doomed lovers had been around for a while (see: Pyramus and Thisbe). 

However, Romeo and Juliet has been filmed so many times now that an adaptation needs to do something special for it to work. Whether that’s the aesthetic of Romeo + Juliet, the existential crisis-inducing weirdness of Gnomeo and Juliet, the zombies of Warm Bodies, or the singing of West Side Story, most of the films I watched had a unique spin on the story. But was that enough? I was experiencing something similar to the phenomenon of “superhero fatigue:” too many versions of the same idea in too short a time.

I liked Romeo + Juliet best as an adaptation, but Warm Bodies entertained me the most, despite the cheesiness. However, I can’t say I truly loved any of the movies I watched. I enjoyed them, but I’m starting to think that Romeo and Juliet just doesn’t work for me anymore. 

This isn’t to say that Romeo and Juliet is a bad play. Its language is evocative and it’s often a good gateway to the rest of Shakespeare’s writing. Still, I found that I couldn’t relate to the main characters’ intense passion, which happened ridiculously fast. I was rooting for them individually, but I wasn’t sure what they saw in one another.

I especially couldn’t understand how Juliet could get over Romeo killing her cousin/brother/boyfriend/gnomrade in each movie. You’d think that would be a red flag. Apparently not. 

During my journey through Romeo and Juliet, I learned that The Lion King 2 was based on it as well. I had never heard of The Lion King 2, but it makes sense. The Lion King’s many installments and interpretations only serve to reinforce my observations about the repetition of certain stories. After all, the first movie was based on Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

Ultimately, watching five adaptations of one adaptation in three days was exhausting. In a way, it was also enlightening. One taught me patience, one taught me pain, etc. The movies made me think about the catharsis of tragedy and the persistence of romantic stories. 

Most of all, however, my week of Romeo and Juliet adaptations made me curious about the rest of Shakespeare’s works. Maybe I’m more interested in Twelfth Night or The Taming of the Shrew than Romeo and Juliet. 

Usually, I watch a rom-com on Valentine’s Day. This time, I’ve decided to watch Pacific Rim. If nothing else, I’ve learned that romance movies are best watched in moderation.