Kenneth Branagh's Hamlet: A highly rewatchable movie

In line with an earlier post about The Kinks' Muswell Hillbillies and its relistenability, I find myself a week-deep into watching and rewatching Kenneth Branagh's 1996 film version of Hamlet repeatedly. To be honest, I haven't yet sat down and watched it straight through. But considering the film is something like four hours long, I don't think I'm to blame. Rather, I've been putting it on, at almost any time of the day, selecting a scene that appeals to me at the moment, and then letting it run. Sometimes I sit there and watch, attention undivided; other times, I simply have it on as a background noise. The point here is, though, I'm not the least bit tired of it yet (and I've must have played it four times already).

Why so rewatchable? I don't know. I like the Oliver version of Hamlet very much, as well, but I have very little desire to rewatch it. I can say this much for Branagh's Hamlet: It's not the least bit dull, even in the dullest scenes. My guess is he knew that shooting the play in its entirety would be rather taxing on the audience, and even the slightest lull in the third or fourth hour could be fatal to their attention span, so he decided ahead of time to crank the cast's performances up a notch or two, at the risk of 'hamming' and melodrama and scenery-chewing. His performance of Hamlet is very 'in your face', X-treme, and so forth with the cliches, but hey, the thing about the character Hamet is this: He was spoiled and assumed the world revolved around him, so should it surprise us that he comes off as hammy and obnoxious? And wearing all black and writing bad poetry, he was melodramatic. In short, Hamlet the character, in the very least, should be portrayed as over-the-top.

(Also, it's great to see a production of Hamlet that gives Fortibras his due.)