For the love of God, don't see this movie.

Rating: 1/10 (14 November 2007)

Last night, I felt extremely lucky to be one of the last couple of people to be admitted into the theater to see an advance screening of Beowulf. Starting about thirty minutes into the movie, that happy feeling in the pit of my stomach gave way to a hollow emptiness that put me in one of the worst moods I've ever had walking out of a theater.
Let me give you some background. I was seeing this screening for some extra credit in AP English. Having read the book (which is THOUSANDS of years old, for the record), I expected a movie which...well...told that story. I was wrong. About half an hour into the movie, when everything had been going along all right, but not perfectly, the director just decided, "you know what, I'm throwing this script out the window. It's existed for thousands of years, but I'll but that I can come up with something better within a few months!"
I'm sad, because tens of thousands of people without an advanced educational opportunity who haven't read the Beowulf epic will see this movie and think that that was how the story goes. This movie was such a departure from the Beowulf epic, they should've called it something else entirely. Maybe "Riding on the momentum of '300'".
Besides that debacle, it was also way too much of a cartoon, you spend at least 10 minutes looking at every possible way to block Beowulf's penis from view, and wondering WHY they decided to try and make an epic tale that first introduced the way of the hero to the world into something as bad as this.
Boycott this movie if you have an IQ of 80 or higher. You'll thank me later.