by Shadowmancer | Nov 14 2007
The interesting thing to me, every time I’ve been assigned Beowulf in school, was that we never read past Grendel’s death. That event so defined the life of the protagonist, that we ignore the rest of the story and focus solely on the glory. The rest of the poem is about what happens after the glory. When your best days are behind you, when the most important thing you will ever do has already been done.
Beowulf is an introduction to celebrity. In many ways, celebrities have become our mythic heroes. This halloween I saw children dressed as Paris Hilton, or hair metal singers. So too, do we generally ignore the decline, at least in our remembrances. When they are contemporary, we latch on to them, like our current obsession as a culture with the Britney Spears Sideshow Circus. Sarah Silverman said, at the MTV Video Awards that Britney Spears is “so young, and yet she’s already accomplished everything she’s ever going to.”
That’s Beowulf, in a nutshell.
If you don’t know the poem, haven’t seen one of the numerous film adaptations (Beowulf and Grendel, or The 13th Warrior, for example), I’m sorry. There’s likely to be spoilers ahead.
The film starts with King Hrothgar happily (drunkenly, nakedly) cavorting in the new Mead Hall of Heorot. Neil Gaiman’s humor shines through quite a lot in the lighter moments of the movie, and some of the jokes are surprisingly raunchy, considering. The revelry is, as revelries in areas with trollish monsters tend to be, short-lived. Grendel crashes the party, in an oddly strobed, vicious and gory scene. Grendel, you see, cannot endure the noise. His ear is malformed, and worse, the grotto he occupies acts as some sort of acoustic portal. He simply cannot escape, and it’s actually painful for him.
This is a good point to note: Grendel is not unsympathetic. He’s even a bit pathetic, and seems more like a deformed (and violent) child than any sort of predatory monster. His voice is Crispin Glover, not that you could tell. His accent is so thick that you can barely pick out words, and instead have to piece together what he says based on the reactions of his mother. The film doesn’t give you subtitles, despite the fact that he’s not speaking English half the time.
Of course, Hrothgar sends out the call for heroes, and Beowulf answers. The film gets Grendel out of the way in short order, then focuses on the terrible price that Beowulf (and nearly everyone in Heorot) pays for being, well, human.
As far as acting, everyone is very good with what they’re given, but Brendan Gleason’s Wiglaf steals nearly every scene he’s in. Anthony Hopkins is perfect as the tired, but spunky King Hrothgar, and John Malkovich is hilarious as Unforth, the King’s advisor.
Angelina Jolie is super-sexy as Grendel’s mother. Her voice crawls up your spine, and breathes in your ear. The seduction of Beowulf is very well done. What she does to the sword is almost pornographic.
Which brings me to the animation. I’m sure you’ll see a lot about the uncanny valley in reviews of this film. Like Polar Express before it, the CG is intensely realistic. The uncanny valley is a phenomenon that occurs as an imitation approaches full human likeness. Our acceptance of the imitation rises on a slope as it gets closer to humanlike. But when it gets too human, our acceptance drops off a steep cliff before returning to acceptance when the imitation reaches perfection.
There are moments in the film where you could be looking at a photo of the actors. I know that one person in the audience of our screening could not get past the phenomenon. It actually made her ill to watch the movie.
But the animation is superb. The level of detail is insane, down to the downy little hairs that cover even the “bare” parts of our skin. It’s a beautiful movie, and I found the stylistic choice of computer animation vs. a live action movie satisfying.
Having read the novelization (by Caitlin R. Kiernan), I got a lot more of what was going on than some of the other members of the audience. The adaptation adds to the story, and I highly recommend it. In fact, I’m not sure some of the plot elements are conveyed well enough in the time alloted. I’d be interested to hear from someone who didn’t read the novelization before seeing the film, to see how it fared.
The movie is almost excellent, and in the final analysis, I think it deserves an 6.
Rating: 6/10
Tags:
review, movies, beowulf
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S p o n s o r s
Comparing the score ya gave to what you say it almost seems mis-scored. You make it sound like an 8 or 9, something I’d pay to see. Just saying.
Article Author
I think I’m just becoming a conservative scorer in my old age. ;P
I’m not sure if we need to rethink our scoring system slightly now (I was kind of thinking that 6 equates to about 3 stars/moons/whatever)…
And yes, I would consider Beowulf worth paying to see. I may need to revise the review to mention this, but upon further reflection, I think the 3D effects are extremely gimmicky, and the movie might suffer in a non-3D theater, just because the over-the-top angles might become non-sequiturs.