Starring Cate Blanchett, Clive Owen, Samantha Morton, and Geoffrey Rush. Rated PG.

Two forces driven by religious fanatics goad each other into using thinly conceived excuses to waste their mismatched resources in pointless wars of expansion and naked plunder of earthly resources. Yet, Elizabeth: The Golden Age is set in the past, decades after the Virgin Queen ascended England's Protestant throne, which is where we left her at the end of Elizabeth.

This gaudily textured sequel is again directed by Bandit Queen's Shekhar Kapur, who appears to keep romance-novel covers where his brain should be. Screenwriters Michael Hirst (who wrote the first one) and William Nicholson are not exactly loyal to the historical record, even as distorted by the post-Tudor elite, and their cliché-studded dialogue is decidedly pre-Shakespearean. But it's doubtful that any of this matters much to Kapur, whose primary attention is sweeping overhead shots, massive CGI tableaux, and the distinctive warp and weave of Lizzy's wigs for all occasions.

You can see why Cate Blanchett returned to this star-making well, even if she does look about 20 years younger than the real Elizabeth was in 1585. The costumes are sensational, and who wouldn't want to close out a two-hour movie wearing sleek silver armour on a huge white horse. But the thrust of the film is to show us Queen Elizabeth the woman, something it does with tedious redundancy, despite the fact that Blanchett is able to convey this notion through, you know, acting.

This is primarily examined via her friendship with Walter Raleigh (Clive Owen), shortly after he imported lung cancer from the New World. Surprisingly, he also single-handedly defeated the Spanish Armada, here depicted as manned by cackling, black-clad pseudo-Arabs. The director, however, can't decide whether or not the clash of civilizations is more important than the Queen's antivirginal itch, so he cuts randomly between the two, with everything pumped up by bombastic music and sound effects, enervating both to increasingly risible effect.

As a director, Madame Tussaud couldn't have done a better job, and she wouldn't be nearly as noisy.