Movie Response, Tristan and Isolde

1)I believe the movie starts out with a fight scene to set the stage of the movie. The nobles who would have been told this story knew full well about the feud between the English and the Irish but today's masses are not as informed. We in a way had to be informed about the frequent fights between the two countries and the atrocities committed by all sides.
2)The way that this film shook out made it so that the love potion wouldn't have made a difference. The couple was simply love-struck instead of love-sick, in the movie the couple had already fallen deeply in love and sought each other out only to be heart-broken by a mistake of identities.
3)All of the characters in the movie are what the youth of today might consider to be the stereotypical medieval knights and nobles. We see these traits in not only our characters but in other Hollywood flicks as well, with King Mark as the selfless king, Tristan the brave yet love struck knight, and Isolde the classic "Femme Fatale" of yet another story.
4)The whole movie was based on the mix-up of identities between Isolde and Tristan, in Hollywood the main plot must be the fault of the "Femme Fatale" as we see in numerous other flicks so the filmmakers needed to find a way to make the whole tragedy her fault. By having her hide her identity she makes the audience reach out to Tristan in a way that would have been otherwise difficult to achieve, in the text it is much easier to keep the attention on one character but on screen you need to alter events to get a desired effect.
5)As always the barons are seen as selfish and short sighted, although in this case they wish to overthrow not only Tristan but the king as well. They would rather be enslaved by the English once more and have their land back then to have to give up their rights to a single entity such as the king. This seems to also be an extreme method of the director to get you on Tristan's side, in the text the barons have a defense but on screen they rather deserve what they get.
6)It is very odd that Isolde survives the ending of the movie, but it rather makes sense considering the main character of the whole plot was Tristan. We as the audience usually see him as a loner so it is rather fitting that he should die by himself.
7)This movie was made in classic film noir and as such has a very mixed together story line, we see the main plot of the love story but there are also a great many sub-plots. The feud between Ireland and England plays a much greater part and in the end Tristan dies fighting for the King and we get the sub-plot of Tristan's love for his uncle.