"Queen Cleopatra" (2023)

Calling this a "documentary" is a reach.  "Inspired by" might be better.  Here's the thing.  "The Crown" is fiction.  We accept this because no one knows what is said behind closed doors.  We don't know the state of mind of the various players, we only know, for sure, the events.  And so it is with Cleopatra.  The true answer is "we don't know".  "The Crown" takes place over much of the 20th Century.  Cleopatra's story took place more than 2,000 years ago.  Thanks to the nearly pathological need for the Romans to record everything, we know a lot.  But the dramatizations here?  Complete fiction.  When the historians start saying things like, "One might imagine ..." or "It does seem like ...", you know you are in trouble.  When one of the experts says something about how a figure in the tale was feeling, I cringed.  The actors are strong, the narrative engaging, but the insistence that this is history, and not made-up history, is distracting.  As is the makeup, dialog and costuming.  Okay, documentary budget.  But there didn't seem to be a lot of effort.  No, there was no "glitter makeup".  No, we didn't say "okay" and "yeah" back then and the hip-hop underscoring inserted a couple times pulled me right out of the narrative.  No, Mark Antony most likely did not have a beard and a Bieber-esque hairstyle.  And the costuming.  Oh, the costuming.  The guards look like they are wearing vests made of bathroom mats and the pleather you buy at the craft store.  Cleo spends half the series wearing an ensemble which looks like something from a boho music festival (and never mind the fact that 21 years pass or that she supposedly ages from 18 to 39 ???)  It was also way the heck weird when the footage of the crowds from Caesar's walkabout in Rome is identical to the scenes we see as Cleopatra takes a drive through the countryside of Egypt.  I know, I know, this was done on the fly, but if you are going to tell a story, tell a story.  And be up front about what you are doing.  And, as to the color controversy, it's kind of moot for me.  Back then, there was no "Black" or "White".  Do I believe that Cleopatra was a fair-skinned woman with European features?  No.  And I never have (sorry Elizabeth Taylor).  It just doesn't make sense.  I've always envisioned her skin as being copper or caramel colored, with dark, thick black hair.  That makes sense.  The reason it matters?  Because of the world we live in now.  Back then, well, it was back then.  I return to my original statement.  "We don't know".  Period.  In any case, I did learn a lot of things which surprised me.  I just wish that, as a production, it had been better.