Director Shekhar Kapur’s 1998 film “Elizabeth” reinvigorated the historical costume drama with a pugnacious low-budget pulpiness sorely lacking in most of the indistinguishable cape-and-curtain snoozers that studios such as Miramax had churned out for much of the previous decade. It also provided Cate Blanchett with a star-making turn by refashioning England’s titular “virgin queen” as a warrior rather than the courtly yet aloof schemer that Elizabeth I has usually been portrayed as in movies.

Pairing Ms. Blanchett’s Elizabeth with a genially scheming murderous sidekick in the form of Geoffrey Rush’s Sir Francis Walsingham, and fueled by Mr. Kapur’s peppy mobile camera and gift for composing frames and choosing angles with an eye for portent and big emotions, “Elizabeth” played less like an account of the early life of one of Europe’s great monarchs than the origin of an emotionally vulnerable but otherwise indefatigable superhero of the 1970s Marvel comics variety.

Ms. Blanchett, Mr. Kapur, and Mr. Rush have now reunited for “Elizabeth: The Golden Age” a film opening today that picks up decades into Elizabeth I’s reign. “Spain,” a title card tells us, “is the most powerful empire in the world.” As visualized by Mr. Kapur, the court of Spanish King Phillip II (Jordi Molla) is also the greenest. Eight years has not dimmed Mr. Kapur’s propensity for gleefully old-school visual fireworks. Scenes come and go with increasing brevity in “Elizabeth: the Golden Age.” As the film works its way from a trot to a full gallop, Mr. Kapur’s whirling, swooping camera, oddball lighting effects, and deep-focus tableaux see to it that the first film’s comic book clarity survives the second film’s history-on-fast-forward treatment.

It’s been a rough year at the movies thus far for Imperial Spain. This summer, Milos Forman’s “Goya’s Ghosts” offered a portrait of a church hierarchy studded with leering and purring sadists. Mr. Kapur and co-writers Michael Hirst and William Nicholson now present a Spanish Court drooling over the possibility of vanquishing the Protestant heretic Elizabeth with an armada of ships that “carries in its bowels the Inquisition,” like a plague of fundamentalist E coli.

Even without the Spanish piously licking their collective lips at the prospect of returning England to the papal fold and her Protestant queen to the Tower of London at cannon-point, Elizabeth has her royal hands full at home. Her imprisoned rival Mary Queen of Scots (Samantha Morton in a bid for the title of Queen of Scottish accents) is working overtime at fomenting conspiracy and passing notes to Catholic elements within England. In court, all any of the queen’s allies seem interested in doing is setting up Elizabeth in a strategically advantageous marriage.

The only perks of rank the royal working girl can wedge in between meet-and- greets with potential suitors, progress reports on the Armada, and secret councils with Walsingham, are dalliances with her preferred lady in waiting, Bess (Abbie Cornish). Envious of Bess’s freedom, Elizabeth dotes on her, and together the two indulge in flights of girlish fancy that the monarch’s position on the throne prevents her from realizing. In an unguarded moment during one of several hair brushing and bathing reveries, Bess confesses to the Queen that her dream suitor would need to be “an honest man with friendly eyes.” Elizabeth knows the type, but she also knows that’s not the caliber of bachelor one is likely to meet while trying to keep the lid on a country on the verge of both invasion and religious civil war.

With the arrival of Clive Owen as smiling privateer Walter Raleigh, freshly returned from the new world colony he has named in honor of the Queen’s chastity, it looks like a workplace romance isn’t so unlikely after all. But the mountain of responsibility between Elizabeth and her heart’s content is a high one. Elizabeth remains unreachable, Bess decidedly less so, and inevitably the love triangle between Queen, maiden, and suitor narrows and leaves Elizabeth targeted by destiny’s arrow and not cupid’s. Though starry-eyed Elizabeth rides chastely side-saddle in a romantic interlude with Raleigh, when late in the film she addresses her troops steely-eyed, alone, firmly astride her mount, and dressed to the nines in armor, it’s clear which situation best suits her.

In an article about shooting the first “Lord of the Rings” film in American Cinematographer Magazine, “Rings” cameraman Andrew Lesnie described an initial anxiety he held about visually imbuing the film’s elf priestess character Galadriel, played by Ms. Blanchett, with appropriate enchantment. His fears were allayed when he performed a lighting test on the actress and discovered that she fluoresced quite well on her own. In nearly a decade since “Elizabeth,” Ms. Blanchett’s wattage and keen emotional translucence seemed to have only increased.

“I pretend there’s a pane of glass between me and them,” Elizabeth explains to a young prince struggling with his own royal bearing. “Elizabeth: The Golden Age” bears more than a passing similarity in plot and visual extravagance to the 1933 Greta Garbo vehicle “Queen Christina.” Like Garbo’s performance nearly 75 years ago, Ms. Blanchett memorably combines the redoubtable hero on one side of the glass with the lovestruck loser on the other.