The maximalist interpretation of Shakespeare’s most lovelorn work, released 30 years ago this week (!), retains Elizabethan verse but announces its divergence from rigid classicism from the jump. Our scene is set in fair Verona beach by a news anchor via TV set, relaying the woe of two star-cross’d lovers before clips of civil strife. Fresh off his breakout success in 1992’s Strictly Ballroom, the Australian director boldly mapped the medieval story on to 90s tabloid fixations – grainy footage of violence in the streets, magazine headlines of capos and criminals, helicopter views of car chases and riots that recalled the media circus around the OJ Simpson chase two years prior. It is a movie that could have only been made in the 90s; Luhrmann’s vision of two warring families as rival gangs, replete with their own economic operations and marked territory, tapped into the era’s preoccupation with gangland as a source of transportive art, from movies to hip-hop, and as a conservative fixation for ideas on intrinsic criminality.

Luhrmann and his wife, costume designer Catherine Martin, reimagined Verona as a sun-scorched beach city, incorporating real locations – Mexico City’s famed Immaculate Heart of Mary Church and Chapultepec Palace, Veracruz’s Boca del Río – to convey an urban den of simultaneous reverence and decay. The Montagues, with their heedless hollering and open Hawaiian shirts, and the Capulets, urban cowboys in Cuban-heeled boots, nearly vibrate with loathing and brandish guns marked by Catholic iconography. Perhaps compensating for the at times impenetrable verse, Luhrmann cut and spliced and twirled the camera in a frenetic, at times literal firework display of manic energy. The film’s raucous shootouts and parties now read as an obvious precursor to Euphoria high school – these kids dressed up and showed out, popped ecstasy and ripped around town in souped-up cars. Watching a single scene, even the lovers’ infamous fish tank meet-cute, has the feel of chugging an energy drink.

As such, the blatantly youth-aimed film had plenty of detractors in its time. Critics dismissed it as vulgar and garish, but audiences turned out en masse; Romeo + Juliet made over $147m against a $14.5m budget, boosted in part by a period-defining soundtrack with needle drops from The Cardigans, Everclear, Radiohead and Garbage. (And of course, the song from that oft-replayed fish tank scene, Des’ree’s I’m Kissing You, became the ubiquitous soundtrack for couple-shipping montage videos on 2000s YouTube). By the time I first viewed the film in 2009 – like many, in high school English class, as part of my teacher’s bid to get us invested in Shakespeare – it was already considered a classic.