The acting is surprisingly quite good, and it is refreshing to see one of the BBC adaptations filmed on location instead of a sound stage, but those few positives do not save this mess of a production. Some who are not familiar with Shakespeare are wrongly lead to believe that he has never written a "bad" play, but there are several, and HENRY VIII is certainly one of them. It is utterly thin in drama and plot, and the stakes are never high. It could have been ever so slightly improved by a good cutting, but instead the producers opted to keep it intact, causing most scenes to have a severely slow pace. On top of that, the low budget was obvious and the cinematography suffered as a result. Everything was in shadow. The BBC has certainly done better adaptations.