Beowulf...yet again.

Rating: 2/10 (10 April 2008)

At first viewing this film looks like Shrek without the humour. Tendentious, predictable and overly sonorous in its soundtrack, Beowulf fulfills the light end of the various interpretations of the original Old English poem. Zemeckis comments that he disliked the poem at school and this certainly comes through in his treatment of the material.
Beowulf is a complex poem and one that could lend itself easily to film. It has, after all, been an absorbing and entertaining oral performance for over a thousand years. Yet various recent treatments follow on from Jackson's heroic version of Tolkien's classic and fail to get past the adventure/monster epic appeal.
Firstly, Grendel is not a troll or a Neanderthal. He is a dark and magical cannibal, a descendant of Cain, an outcast and every Anglo-Saxon's worst fear. Outside the warmth of the hall everything is a nightmare. Nature, weather; everything is ruled by a the inexirable course of wyrd...an Anglo-Saxon word badly translated as fate.
Zemeckis and his script writers fall back on pat interpretations. Making Grendel sympathetic is like trying to make Richard III tragic. A sure formula for cheap pathos rather than imaginative character development. In the poem, when Beowulf and Grendel wrestle in the hall, they become almost indistinguishable from each other. They represent not just light and dark or good and evil, but the uncertain striving of ambitions and male sexuality. Theirs is a very uncomfortable enmity because their oppositions begin to resemble each other in the violence of their actions.
Beowulf the character is heroic because he seeks to create the heroic in a flawed society. Which is not the same as being a flawed hero. As a poem, Beowulf, like other great poems and narratives, still waits for a treatment that responds to and recgnises the deeper subtlety of its characters and plot rather than handing over its translation to a pair of uninformed scrptwriters.