Product: Beowulf (1999)
Rating: 4.0
Unlimited Insanity
Anyone coming for a faithful Beowulf adaptation, or in fact anything remotely like any reasonable Hollywood film one has ever seen, is in for a real surprise. I hope you like surprises, as I sometimes do, because after a third viewing I have to confess that _Beowulf_ is probably the best recent example I have seen of whatever passes for unintentional surrealism these days.Plenty of people who like their genres served whole have complained that this movie looks cobbled togetther from dozens of different films, and that the parts don't sit right together. I am compelled to agree. Never before have I seen a medieval sci-fi horror western martial arts film with a couple of soft-core scenes thrown in for good measure. No other movie would dare to cut from a crowd of futuristically dressed soliders carrying swords, screaming "Kill the Beast!", straight to Christopher Lambert in a trenchcoat on a horse, accompanied the whistle from _The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly_ on the soundtrack. That's as cool as the unexpected intersection of a sewing machine and umbrella on some psycho future guillotine bed.Depending on your point of view, everything is wrong or a whole lot works. Christopher Lambert is as convincing as he ever has managed to be (I'd pay just to hear him say, "I'm Beowulf" a few more times), the supporting acting is all slightly off, the lead women are gorgeous, and the soundtrack--The soundtrack deserves its own paragraph. Ben Watkins of Juno Reactor, currently one of the best two techno outfits in the business, basically remixed a bunch of industrial and used a lot of his own stuff to create possibly the most overblown film soundtrack ever--as might be expected, given how much like a b-action film Juno Reactor's music already is. It's less a soundtrack than an entirely separate movie which doesn't sit well along with the all this stuff from _Beowulf_ it has to accompany. Watkins has killer techno going before the fight scenes can even really get underway, leading to the amusing audio-visual experience of hearing his music brought way down on the mix so we can hear the sounds of people walking around, looking out warily for the monster. Not content to use everyday horror shock cues, he seems to have substituted an electric guitar for the usual "woosh" noises, bringing the film into the fifth dimension, without space or time, where Bernard Hermann has no meaning.So that's that. I don't know if you'd want to buy it. Try renting it first.