Cate at the helm of a shaky 'Elizabeth'

Cate Blanchett's big scene in "Elizabeth: The Golden Age" has her rallying the British troops as they face the Spanish invasion fleet.

Her virgin queen gives an inspiring speech, but the horse underneath her just won't cooperate, pulling the actress this way and that, wavering the pitch of the deep voice she's cultivated for this commanding role.

That kind of describes the movie as a whole - Blanchett doing her level best to keep control of a movie going in 10 directions at once.

That's a shame, since "The Golden Age" is a sequel to "Elizabeth," the 1998 movie that made young Blanchett a star and semi-annual Oscar nominee, and was quite fun to boot.

Blanchett's coming-out party was handsomely presented by director Shekhar Kapur, full of vibrant colors that made the costume drama shimmer with life. Blanchett played a younger Elizabeth as a woman forced to shed youth and naivete in order to survive - a messy confluence of political religious intrigue endangered her life and her kingdom.

There was a great role in there for Geoffrey Rush as her scary Protestant hatchet man, and his ruthless manuevers to protect her from dangerous intrigues of the court gave the movie drive.

Kapur, Blanchett and Rush are back, and people (suspects include the rest of Europe) are still trying to kill poor Liz, but the movie has other preoccupations. Mainly her man trouble, or lack thereof. She entertains royal suitors from throughout Europe (a strategic alliance is sought), before becoming infatuated with Sir Walter Raleigh (Clive Owen), an English adventurer just back from the New World.

"The Golden Age" fabricates a subplot that has a man-seeking Elizabeth hunting a husband so she can conceive a child, putting her on breeding par with her Catholic rival, Mary Stuart (Samantha Morton).

This history is fudged - the real Elizabeth was past 50 at this point in her reign, and was understandably more concerned with how to stop King Philip and the armada he's dispatched to conquer England.

"The Golden Age" seems to be reaching for modern references here - Philip is depicted as a loopy religious fanatic, seeking to obliterate "conscience" and "liberty" (Elizabeth's words). He sends suicide squads to England, hoping to bait Elizabeth into a response that would turn Catholic Europe more ugently against her.

The darkness of this narrative sits uneasily with the soap opera of Elizabeth's girlish infatuation with Raleigh, played unconvincingly by Owen. There's something amusingly dissolute about him - you can see why he was cast as Raleigh, the worldly maverick. Owen's brand of wordliness is so unmistakeably modern, though, that he always looks vaguely ridiculous in period get-up (remember him as King Arthur?).

Still, there's stuff to like here: Elizabeth and Raleigh sitting alone, talking about the possibilities of the New World, the new societies that could be built there.

Taken together, the two Blanchett/Elizabeth movies see the monarch as a modern woman (her ceiling has stained glass) confined in 16th century. In the dreamy moments with Raleigh, Blanchett captures her as a woman ahead of her time, almost able to envision it. *

Produced by Tim Bevan, Eric Fellner, Jonathan Cavendish, directed by Shekhar Kapur, written by William Nicholson, Michael Hirst, music by Craig Armstron, Ar Rahman, distributed by Universal Pictures.