The Illusion of Control by Matt Hartenstein

The movie Tempest is a modern day interpretation of Shakespeare’s The Tempest and is full of drama from the beginning of the movie, with its foreshadowing “nightmare”, which turns into a reality, to the relationships and conflicts throughout. The main drama of the film is Philip and the slow loss of his sanity. Philip is an architect. He works for Alonzo designing and building casinos for him. At one of the construction sites, Philip has a vision of jumping/falling off the casino and killing himself. He immediately looks at Alonso and says, “I quit,” leaving the audience to ponder why he quit so suddenly. In a confrontational scene with his wife, he explains how he hates everything. His big plan is foreshadowed when he is on the helicopter and says he’s going to, “...find me an island and just watch the sunrise”(Tempest). During Philip’s stay on the island, the audience can see more and more the evidence of his loss of sanity. The audience witnesses an example of this firsthand when we see Philip, Kalibanos, Miranda, and Aretha renovate an old outdoor theater for tourists; why someone would want to remodel a theater on an island where almost no one visits is anyone’s guess. Near the end of the movie we see that Philip has lost his sanity; when Kalibanos tells Philip that tourists are coming, something that he should be excited about because this is the whole reason he was building a theater in the first place, Philip nonchalantly babbles on about baseball. When Philip finally does see that a boat is on its way, he finds out that it’s Alonzo and his “crew”. Philip then decides to “call forth” a tempest to destroy the boat. It is at this point that the film arrives at its climax. This is when Philip’s insanity reaches its apex; he is standing outside chanting and dancing for a storm, definitely not something a sane person would do, at least not with belief in the act. At the end we see Philip back with Antonia, his wife (after an affair of a little over a year with Alonzo), and everyone seems to have found someone.

In Shakespeare’s play The Tempest, the major drama is the revenge that Prospero seeks against those who took his throne from him and marooned him on the island. The first evidence the audience sees of Prospero’s want for revenge is with the tempest that he summons upon his brother’s ship. In contrast to the film, Prospero has complete control over his tempest while Philip tries to stop it after he sees that he has lost control over “his” tempest. In Prospero’s attempt to seek revenge, instead of flat out killing Antonio, his brother, the audience sees that maybe he has thought many steps ahead. This is evidenced by the fact that he tries to establish a relationship with his daughter, Miranda, and Ferdinand, the next in line to the throne. Prospero knew that if he were to “play his cards right” he might have a chance at regaining what is rightfully his instead of seeking cold-blooded vengeance. This is evidenced by the fact that at the end of the story Prospero has a “change of heart” and Alonzo, Sebastian, and Antonio, his own brother who turned against him.