Wuthering Heights (1992)

Highly Overrated But Still Good

Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

The film may be flawed, but its message is not.

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

Grim and dark this is the perfect choice for those sick and tired of the usual sugary romcom fair. It is a satisfying but tortured arc that carries Healthcliff from relative innocence to tortured and sadistic villainy - which Fiennes would later put to good use in "Schindler's List. If the plodding and superficial movie classic from 1939 turned you off Bronte, the deeper character development and dark intensity of this adaptation will awaken you to what all the fuss was about when Bronte introduced her only novel to the world in 1847. It received a poor reception as the depiction of mental cruelty and social hypocrisy were deemed controversial to Victorian sensibilities and it is exactly this stark and harsh commentary on the times that is embraced to great effect in this movie.

This movie is a waste of time and money for both the makers and the audiences, not to mention, a waste of talents on such big movie stars as Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche.The characters are shallow and unable to demonstrate their complex emotion. Their relationships were never really get developed properly in a race-against-time script that compounding with the poor direction which certainly resulting in a horrible film that did not do justice to the book! Emily Bronte would definitely have reacted strongly against this travesty of literature.The inexperienced director (a small time TV-movie director) is inadequate for such a complex story. The poor script is insufficient for characters development. The cast is completely wrong for their parts.This must be a career low point for both Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche.

The film is very good. There is no doubt about that. The only problem is that individual episodes from the characters' lives are cut too abruptly. Decades pass by like seconds... At times, the actions almost look like photos in an album. You simply cannot pay enough attention to every single detail. It is obvious that the director and screenwriter have both expected that every single viewer has read the book, which is, sadly enough, not the case. People who didn't read the book may struggle to understand Heathcliff's actions or his complex inner world.But, considering the fact that the filming of such an intense story about love and mad passion is extremely difficult,next to impossible, I must admit that this is, by far, the best attempt at it anyone has ever made.

Wuthering Heights is one of my favorite romantic English novels.That's why I was curios to see all the movies based on this book. Unfornutately, this version was a great disappointment for me, taking into consideration the actors chosen for playing Cathy and Heathcliff. Will all due respect, Fiennes and Binoche are too "soft" and unconvincing, compared with the wild, intensely passionate and powerful characters they were supposed to play. On the other hand, I think that the physical resemblance of the actors with the characters imagined in the book are also extremely important, in order to give force and credibility to the cinematographic version of the novel. For these reasons, in my opinion, the best film based on Bronte's Wuthering Heights remains the one made in 1939, with Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon.