I am honestly at a bit of a loss writing this. I sat down fully believing this movie would be a profound failure. They cast Angelina Jolie as Grendel’s Mother, for Christ’s sake. There was at some point a conversation that ended with “—and that’s why the only real choice to play a monstrous descendent of the Biblical Cain is a computer animated naked-as-the-day avatar of the woman who played Daniel Pearl’s wife. In high heels.” (No, I am not kidding.) But, wonder of wonders, I enjoyed it. Quite a bit, actually. Beowulf is a good movie.
Now, of course, it’s not a good movie in the same way that Chinatown or es Quatre Cents Coups are good movies. It’s a good movie in the sense that movies involving nude Scandinavians dismembering giant retarded zombie children are good movies (again, not kidding).
The first thing you’ll notice is how much the character animation has improved since The Polar Express, which was a nightmarish descent into an uncanny valley full of dead, dead eyes, like those of war orphans. There’s still something a little… off… about the eyes, but it’s not the sanity-blasting experience of the aforementioned film.
The inanimate (so to speak) objects, on the other hand, are simply marvelous. To take a minor example, the way the animators captured the different textures of rock and wood and leather and so on is quite the display of artistry. And this really is a movie that’s all about the spectacle.
I saw this in IMAX THREEEE-DEEEE, so that might have contributed materially to the experience, but the primary endorsement I have for Beowulf is that it is a hell of a lot of fun to watch. Sure, there’s some attempt at character development and subtext (more than I thought there’d be, actually; I’ll come back to some weirdness on that count), but the creators know that audiences can only stomach so much of cartoon Danish people talking to each other before the audience needs to see one of them picked up by Grendel and used to beat the other to death.
That sounds really condescending, but it’s actually a kind of praise. The movie knows what it is, makes a few desultory attempts with varying amounts of success to rise above that, but ultimately accepts and rejoices in it.
The acting is pretty much what is needed for a film like this. Ray Winstone’s Beowulf talks REALLY LOUDLY and SHOUTS FOR EMPHASIS and generally does an impression of Leonidas from 300. Anthony Hopkins gives an unexpected gravitas to the drunken, over-the-hill King Hrothgar, although it’s debatable whether this is intentional or just a side-effect of being Anthony Hopkins.
John Malkovich (“malkovich malkovich”) clearly had a hell of a time chewing the virtual scenery up as the jealous advisor Urfrith. Robin Wright Penn’s Wealthow sounds at times as if she’s a little conscious of how ridiculous the whole thing is (whereas the aforementioned actors have clearly said “the hell with it” and decided to play it to the hilt).
Angelina Jolie as Grendel’s Mother is cast as an exotic seductress whose charms can make even the strongest-willed men succumb; guess how well it works. Special mention should be made for Crispin Glover, who makes Grendel artfully pathetic and perhaps even sympathetic while remaining monstrous and frightening.
Those of you scratching your head at the above description of Grendel’s mother have caught on that the faithfulness of the film’s adaptation could charitably be described as a touch loose. What is especially odd is that they chose to stay pretty true to the work in minor details like the swimming match with Brecca and the melting of Hrunting (in a scene that will have the goateed little Freudian in your head scribbling furiously into your notebook-that-is-just-a-notebook), but they jettison the entire ending of the poem and weave a brand-new one out of whole cloth.
Admittedly, the new version is more dramatically satisfying than “and now the wyrm of Earnaness showeth up and killeth the hero,” but their schizophrenic approach to canon might be a bit distracting to people who know the story.
Also bizarre is the addition of a subplot involving Christianity supplanting the older gods of the Danes. In addition to just being a strange thing to add to Beowulf, it’s awkwardly shoehorned into the story. Every so often something will happen and one of the characters will randomly spout something like “WELL WHAT ABOUT THIS CHRIST JESUS FELLOW” and everyone in the audience gets yanked out of the movie temporarily by this bizarre digression. If my description seems like an odd and out-of-place thing to be reading, I assure you it is doubly so in the actual film.
But seriously, at the end of the day it’s a story about a big muscled Swedish dude who takes off his pants and rips the arm off a monster after he spends the night in a glorified giant bar with his Viking buddies. Angelina Jolie wanders around in the altogether, and a guy fights a dragon by riding around and trying to crash it into a castle. Yeah. If you want brainless-but-awesome spectacle, go see it, and remember that thousand year-old epic sagas are better in IMAX 3-D.