Seventy-five years after its initial release, Olivier’s 1944 Henry V remains the template for filming Shakespeare’s play. Subsequent adaptations follow its basic structure, with the Battle of Agincourt at its core. What has changed are attitudes towards war and heroism. More ill at ease with warlike Harry, Branagh’s 1989 version, presents a darker Henry and the play becomes grittier: after Vietnam and the Falklands, war had become politically more questionable. Western Europe had not seen war on its soil since Olivier’s day. The following twenty years only confirmed that trend, and when Peter Babakitis made his version of the film in 2007, wedged between the two Gulf Wars, the play again served as a metaphor for media manipulation. The two first decades of the century have witnessed the explosion of the internet with access to images and information so immediate that they become difficult to actually verify. Next to highly researched and documented catalogues from sites like the British Library, there are a number of webpages that say virtually anything. Between these extremes we run the entire gamut of sources and interpretations: newspapers, personal blogs, television downloads, MOOC’s and YouTube free-form videos. All this information is placed on the same level. Alongside the great advances in conventional history, we have the internet’s viral and highly emotional user-responses, one post is followed by hundreds of comments leading to another post. This practice in turn influences the very historians who should know better: is Henry V a war criminal as Desmond Seward paints him, or a model king, following Malcolm Vale’s presentation? What did his face look like: is the profile portrait hiding the scar? Internet crowding makes the Middle Ages seem darker, and in many ways more mysterious and complex today than they did seventy years ago, and that is reflected in the later versions of Henry V, such as the Hollow Crown series or Netflix’ recent The King (a film that is only nominally linked to Henry°V). How to come to terms with such a mess? Perhaps by taking our time, logging off and rereading Shakespeare. Like its historical namesake, King Henry V is known for its ambivalence. It is a play that demands the audience’s sustained attention, with various levels of information: Agincourt itself is reduced to a joke. Shakespeare wrote his play as a warning against media manipulation.