Fine, but that's all.

Rating: 2/10 (22 August 1999)

I watched the 13th two days ago with my girl friend, who graduated as a BA of English Literature. Having studied _Beowulf_ when she was in college, she loved the film. But I was more conservative about it.
The most visible difference between the movie and the novel was the viewpoint. The book was composed as two parts: ibn Fadlan's 1st person narrative, and the scholar's voice in footnotes that acts as a 3rd person omniscient (or smartass) viewer. The movie only follows ibn Fadlan's line. Its viewpoint was closer to _Beowulf_, many of Crichton's inventions were removed, something as the Neanderthalian hypothesis.
The movie was designed to be a testosterone-rich saga. Ibn Fadlan turned to be a he-man in nearly no time. You can see him display his masculinity in front of the Vikings shortly after he was kidnapped. You just don't have the idea why and when he became stronger, and was willing to fight for these barbarians. (Hint: watch for the quickest language lesson in the history of movie making.)
To sell the movie as a superhero film, they omitted some flavorable parts in Crichton's original. Say the whale part. Why should these Vikings fear a whale? Wasn't a whale supposed to be a kid's best friend? Didn't you see _Free Willy_ before? But the whale part was one of the most interesting part in the _Eaters of the Dead_, and came straight from the first paragraph of _Beowulf_ (whale-road as the ocean). It made the film less tasty to skip the whale part.
As the movie's title implied, the show was focused on the 13th warrior solely. Throughout the film, the rest 12 of them were neglected, including Buliwyf, the one created by Crichton as his own Beowulf. You didn't know much about him, not to mention the others. Some warriors remained faceless and nameless until they died. Then you learned about their names postmortem. And after the show, you still didn't have a clue about how many of them survived. All you could see was Antonio, Antonio, and Antonio. That's why the movie bugged me most.
Otherwise it was viewable. And I'll very probably see it again. It was entertaining. But that was all. It could be better if the film was more complete. I mean the edition showed in Taiwan was only about 95 minutes long which was 20 minutes shorter than the US edition. It was rated R in the US while PG in Taiwan. So it was clear that I did not see the whole picture.