Shakespeare our contemporary? Not quite, in Hopkins's King Lear

Last night I watched the first half hour - into Act 2 I think (the expulsion from Goneril's estate) of the Anthony Hopkins King Lear (on Prime); I doubt I'll watch any further. Not that it's a terrible production or anything - it has many strengths - but there's also something about it that's entirely wrong. They set the play in contemporary London - with the opening sequence showing the bright lights of the financial-district towers at night - slowly moving us toward a government building, an appropriate locale for the first act, the king's division of the country among his daughters. But soon I recognized that the contemporary setting just feels ridiculous - at least without major modifications to the text. It's OK I guess to have an aged king of England dividing up the realm but it's totally weird when he says things like "By Appollo!" And gradually, the realistic-contemporary setting seems more and more absurd: A king sitting in a darkened room with just his three daughters and some of the upper nobility dividing the kingdom into sections on a hand-drawn map? How could this be? And the visit to Goneril, with the crowd of soldiers in camo acting like a bunch of louts? And the king has a jester, too? No, it makes no sense at all. There have been other updates of Lear - Jane Smiley's Thousand Acres; Kurosawa's Ran - that work well (at least Kurasowa's does) because they just use the dynamics of the plot, rebuilding as necessary (Shakespeare would approve of course, that greatest of adapters). But to take the play literally and stage it in contemporary setting is ludicrous; it's a medieval play and should look and feel that way - ghostly, dark, brutal, sparsely populated. That said, the English are always great at certain aspects of Shakespeare: The look of the setting is visually fine, even if it makes no sense, and the cast, especially Hopkins and Emma Thompson (Goneril) are great at line readings. It won't do you any harm to watch the whole movie - though I would definitely say it is totally unsuitable for a first-time viewer/reader of King Lear. I'd start with the Peter Brook 1971 film if possible and work down from there.