You will write an Essay about your "reading" of Kenneth Branagh's cinematic "reading" of Henry V. Here are some excerpts from Branagh's own comments about his screenplay. They may provide suggestions for your response, but they shouldn't dictate it.
For a modern audience, the abiding image of Henry V is provided by Sir Laurence Olivier's famous film version, but the powerful Elizabethan pageanry and chivalric spendour of that extraordinary movie did not accord with the impression I received as I read the text afresh. To me, the play seemed darker, harsher, and the language more bloody and muscular . . . In [an earlier stage performance as Henry] I tried to realise the qualities of introspection, fear, doubt and anger which I believed the text indicated: an especially young Henry with more than a little of Hamlet in him. It was conveying these elements of the king's personality that gave me the initial idea for a new screen version--the idea of abandoning large-theatre projection and allowing close-ups and low-level dialogue to draw the audience deep into the human side of this distant medieval world.
I started work on the first draft [of the screenplay] in January 1988. It seemed clear that a great deal of the text would have to be cut, as I was determined that the film should be of commercial length . . . The cuts dictated themselves. The more tortuous aspects of the Fluellen/Pistol antagonism, culminating in the resoundingly unfunny leek scene, were the first to go. The double-edged exchange between Henry and Burgundy in Act V also . . . added little to the aspects of the play we wanted to explore . . . I wanted there to be no fat on the film at all . . .
I decided on including some significant scenes that Olivier's film . . . had left out: in particular, the conspirators' scene where Henry stage-manages a public cashiering of the bosom friends who have been revealed as traitors. The violence and extremism of Henry's behaviour and its effect on a volatile war cabinet were elements that the Olivier version [produced during World War II] was not likely to spotlight. I reinstated the savage threats to the Governor of Harfleur . . . I also decided to go one step further in bringing the character of Falstaff firmly into the action. . . . My intention [in the flashback] was to give, in miniature, a sense of Falstaff's place among the surviving members of the Boar's Head crew, and to make clear his former relationship and estrangement from the young monarch. Both this scene and the flashback during Bardolph's on-screen execution help to illustrate the young king's intense isolation and his difficulty in rejecting his former tavern life.
Above all the aim of the screenplay has been to bring out what some critics have referred to as the 'play within the play': an uncompromising view of politics and a deeply questioning, ever-relevant and compassionate survey of people and war.
(From Henry V, by William Shakespeare: A Screen Adaption by Kenneth Branagh [London: Chatto & Windus, 1989], pp. 9-120.