Isabel and I saw Beowulf tonight...in 3D even.
If you are going to see it, do the 3D thing. The novelty is the only thing that makes the movie worthwhile.
I kid you not that Isabel actually wept when we were leaving...actually, bona fide tears of an English major horrified by the adaptation...or, should I say mutilation...of the Anglo Saxon epic.
Most of the problems (which I will address later perhaps) could have easily been addressed by changing the movie's title. If it had been called "Heorot" (where the entire movie is set inaccurately), I might have been warmer to the changes. If it had been called "Grendel's Mother," I would have swallowed the attempt to retell the story from the villain's perspective. Indeed, there are several scenes where you spend time in a 1st Person shooter style sequence from inside her head, and the first several glimpses of her are done in reflections. Personally, I think they should have called the movie "Not-Beowulf: You'll Fail Your English Quiz If You Watch This Movie."
My list of complaints is rather long, and somewhat tedious, but I'll start you with this:
Unferth, the brother-slaying Beowulf-hater, converts to Christianity, becomes a monk, and is also the wicked master who beats his slave who runs away and steals from the dragon's lair...leading to the awakening of the dragon who is (spoiler) also Beowulf's son. That's right...the Dragon is Beowulf's son.
This is particularly ironic because (as anyone who reads their Norton introduction is bound to discover) the Christian monks who copied Beowulf have long been praised for their refusal to inject any Christianity into the narrative of the text. The monks did make sidebar Christian judgments in the narration, but, as far as we know, they didn't alter the actual events of the narrative, nor did they "baptize" any characters. There are no Christian characters in Beowulf, although the behavior of pagan characters is praised or condemned through a Christian worldview. This means that the earliest Christian scribes probably did less violence to the story than the 21st Century British author.
The themes of good vs. evil, the idyllic warrior chieftain, kinship, the thane-lord relationship, the struggle against impossible doom, the transience of human endeavours, and the catastrophe of humans warfaring against each other despite a greater evil that seeks the destruction of the entire clan of humanity are all entirely missing from the movie. Indeed, Beowulf's thanes never even betray him during the battle with the dragon leading to his death (he ultimately dies by hacking off his own arm in a call-back to his battle with Grendel). The movie version of Grendel doesn't kill out of a long-term bloodlust for humanity; he kills because he has a grossly deformed ear that gives him a heightened awareness of sound...and any noise literally drives him pitifully insane to the point where he is compelled to destroy the source of that sound.
The movie's ultimate theme is that there is no such thing as a perfect hero (Beowulf says, quite like Shakespeare's Antony, that he must have some flaws to be a real man...although the Anglo-Saxon epic would suggest that having flaws is precisely what makes a person not a real man). It also says that all the stories we tell ourselves are pretty much intentionally falsified to make ourselves feel better (which makes one wonder how one is supposed to trust this particular version of the story). It also argues that kings are only successful rulers so long as the make Faustian pacts with supernatural to pursue personal glory (but when they break those pacts, their people suffer). Indeed, the movie owes a lot to Dr. Faustus...as well as Death of a Salesman. There is a scene where Unferth mutters "The sins of our fathers...the sins of our fathers." The sin in question is having an illicit sexual liason, making Unferth seem a lot like Biff lamenting Willy Loman's tryst on a business trip. That being said, I'm not sure why there is anything wrong with having sex with supernatural beings in the movie, so long as one never breaks the pact one makes with them. Indeed, if Beowulf had simply better protected the magic talisman that granted him immortality, say, by sending an army to defend Grendel's lair, or by taking regular visits to Grendel's mother and raising the dragon personally, much of the tragedy could have been avoided. Instead, Beowulf is a deadbeat dad, and the Danes are punished for it (note that it's the Danes who are attacked by the dragon, not the Geats. Movie Beowulf succeeds Hrothgar rather than his own king Hygelac, who never appears in the film). Wiglaf, incidentally, does nothing to aid Beowulf in the dragon fight, and the movie leaves him in the middle of a temptation with Grendel's mother.
Ultimately, I felt like I was watching a movie that depicts Santa Claus as a really having been a pedophile who lured children with free toys, but then apologized for his behavior late in life and gave away a lot of free toys to his former victims to make up for it...so all of his friends decided just to tell the part about the free toys and skip the part about pedophilia.
The story this movie tells is that the "reality" behind stories aren't always what the stories would lead you to believe in. That might be a valid story to tell, but it's not the story of Beowulf.
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