Beowulf
If you’re going to see Beowulf at all, make sure you see it in the cinema on the biggest screen you can possibly find (which will be IMAX 3-D if you’re fortunate enough to live near one). Watching this on television would be as futile as attempting to duplicate the sensation of a rollercoaster by watching camcorder footage filmed by someone on the rollercoaster.
Beowulf is based on the Anglo Saxon poem on the same name, which incidentally was a big influence on writers like Tolkien (check out the Scandinavian influenced, Beowulf-esque culture of Rohan in The Lord of the Rings). However, to say the film departs from the text somewhat is an understatement. In case you didn’t study this at school, it tells of the warrior Beowulf who slays Grendel, a demon monster terrorising an 8th Century Danish village. Unfortunately, Grendel’s mother is understandably not too pleased at this development, so assumes the form of Angelina Jolie to seduce Beowulf in an attempt to conceive another demon offspring. Hang on – that’s the film, not the poem. Well, sort of.
Director Robert Zemeckis uses the increasingly fashionable tool of motion capture to craft his animated rendering of this classic tale. For the uninitiated, motion capture is a tool where the actor’s movements are recorded and scanned into a computer to attain an animated performance so meticulously detailed as to be almost indistinguishable from live action. At least, that’s what it says on the tin. In truth, motion capture is clearly still animation but the technology is getting better all the time (this is certainly a significant advance on Zemeckis’ previous motion capture tale The Polar Express).
On the performance front, Beowulf is an enjoyable mishmash of silly accents – especially Angelina Jolie’s ludicrous seductive tones, Anthony Hopkins Welsh-Danish King Hrothgar and Ray Winstone’s cockney Beowulf (“I will slay your monstah!”). And that’s before I even mention Crispin Glover. I kept expecting his spectacularly grotesque Grendel to slip into George McFly mode and yell to Hrothgar “I just can’t take that kind of rejection!”.
Which brings me neatly onto the issue of Grendel’s father, who in this version turns out to be Hrothgar. This is important, because it adds a potentially interesting spiritual theme, ie the sins of the fathers coming back to haunt them and so on. Not that this is a particularly deep film. Or a particularly spiritual one. In fact, whatever spiritual positions it does take mostly depart from the vaguely Christian worldview of the original poem (where Beowulf often credits God for his victories). Here however, the influence of Christianity is largely seen as negative and leading to wars between men. One line sums up this paganism-was-better philosophy, where Beowulf laments that “There are no heroes anymore. The Christ God has killed them all”.
That said Beowulf himself becomes a sort of Christ figure near the end as he faces up to his mistakes and ultimately discovers the true nature of heroism in his final battle with the dragon. Incidentally, this sequence is the highlight of the film; an absolutely breathtaking set piece replete with dizzying camera moves and thrilling, edge-of-the-seat cliffhanger action. It’s worth the price of admission alone, but again I must add the caveat that it has to be seen on the big screen.
Make no mistake, Beowulf is a big, silly film with very little to recommend it outside of its astounding but gimmicky visual effects. But whilst scholars will no doubt complain about changes from the poem, it’s also something of guilty pleasure, and audiences who do see it will not come out complaining about lack of bang for their buck.
One final point: this is absolutely not a film for children. There is a surprising amount of nudity and violence considering the rating it got (12A in the UK, PG-13 in the States). Having said that, most of the blood and gore are the result of Beowulf’s fights with various monsters and the nudity is “virtual nudity”, so perhaps the film got off on a technicality.
Simon Dillon, November 2007.
