Beowulf
Saturday evening, donnaustin and I went to see Beowulf in 3D. One word verdict: Interesting. Not in a bad way, mind you. I really enjoyed seeing it, and this was certainly aided by the good company. And dude, the dragon was awesome.
Really, I'm using the word interesting because the movie left me thinking. Beowulf seems to be a movie that is getting wildly varying reactions. The funniest reaction I've seen so far was this guy, who was so virtuously offended by "the most heinous culprit for stealing childhood from children ever made" that I kept expecting to have to wipe his frothy spittle off my face, as that much venomous sputum must have the magical ability to travel through the internet in physical form. More erudite, reasoned reactions abound, and this one in particular had some very interesting points on the relative treatment of female characters in the movie vs. the poem.
My own reaction? Well, I'd gotten over the WTFfery of Angelina Jolie and her weird-ass put on accent as Grendel's mother by the time I'd seen the trailer twice, so I wasn't exactly expecting a strictly faithful adaptation. (I also wasn't expecting stiletto feet, but that's another matter.) Plus, it's been at least five years since I last read Seamus Heaney's beautiful translation of Beowulf, so I wasn't exactly freshly ready to be offended. It's actually one of the more interesting book to film adaptations I've seen recently, because it's so very aware of its differences. It's a layered adaptation that leaves a space for the poem itself in its own acknowledgment of the art of storytelling and in its implicit acknowledgment of the impossibility of creating an artistically successful and completely faithful transliteration of the poem to film. The demands of both the medium and the expected audience are just too different.
Beowulf is very much a twenty-first century movie, and not just in Zemeckis' absolute fascination with stretching the boundaries of a new medium. The modern fascination with technology shows up not just in the cool CGI and the novelty of having coins, mead, and spears hurled straight at the you in 3D, it shows up in the script, with Beowulf using the superior technology of a door and a bit of leverage to tear Grendel's arm off instead of actual brawn. Even with Beowulf as the big, brawny "hero" stripping naked to fight, it's still a triumph of brains and tech over brawn. Yet, the movie also manages to reflect the fear that we depend too much on technology, with Beowulf's loss of his sword and the necessity of tearing the Dragon's heart out with his bare hand. The movie also has a very postmodern attitude towards heroism and honor, and an entirely contempory fascination with idealized nudity. Just about everybody who reviews the movie ends up mentioning Angelina Jolie, and just about everybody who reviews the movie ends up cracking jokes about Austin Powers when mentioning Beowulf's fight with Grendel. The nudity is problematic on both occasions because it becomes the focus rather than the plot. I mean, did I mention Grendel's mum's stiletto feet? But, hey. At least they had eye candy on both sides, and both cases were just about equally unrealistic and distracting.
The modernity of the movie is also quite literate (which I suppose is to be expected, considering the screenwriters). It doesn't just respectfully yet uncomfortably refer to and then leave behind its source text, it draws from other texts as well. I haven't actually read more than a small bit of John Gardner's Grendel (I started it in the library as a teen, but decided not to check it out that day and it's been on my "to read" list ever since), but the movie Grendel is obviously indebted to it. Actually, I think my biggest problem with the adaptation was not its lack of similarity to the Old English epic, but its indebtedness to an Early Modern English play (overly Freudian interpretations of it, of course). Perhaps we should have a moratorium on screenwriters (mis)reading Hamlet for a while. (Daddy issues anyone? Wealhtheow as a weird mix of Gertrude and Ophelia?) Of all the things that seemed borrowed or shamefully stolen from Shakespeare, it was Wiglaf as Horatio that really annoyed me -- mainly because of the ambiguity of the ending. The ambiguous open ending actually really pisses me off, because it undercuts the one honest act of heroism that the screenplay allowed -- Beowulf becoming a hero in deed rather than in boast, by taking responsibility for his actions and dying to undo the damage his succumbing to temptation created. At least you got Beowulf breaking a bad cycle, if not being the hero portrayed in the poem. But with Wiglaf the faithful companion and silent observer ending standing on the shore holding the cup and obviously being tempted the same way by Grendel's mother, you don't even have the cleanly broken cycle. Not fair. They could have easily left us with the passing of an age, but they had to add a possible continuation of corruption.
All that aside, I was utterly seduced by the coolness factor. I like shiny things that make me go, "ooh, pretty!" They won't carry an entire movie by themselves if the plot is insultingly dumb, but they'll make me much more happy to watch a flawed movie. And thus, we come to the Dragon. Beowulf's fight with the dragon has got to be the coolest ever committed to film, and this is where the new tech really really shines. This is no Dragonheart. This is no puny, pathetic Reign of Fire. This is a seamless, convincing, and awesome dragon, and I would totally watch the film again just for that.
Really, I'm using the word interesting because the movie left me thinking. Beowulf seems to be a movie that is getting wildly varying reactions. The funniest reaction I've seen so far was this guy, who was so virtuously offended by "the most heinous culprit for stealing childhood from children ever made" that I kept expecting to have to wipe his frothy spittle off my face, as that much venomous sputum must have the magical ability to travel through the internet in physical form. More erudite, reasoned reactions abound, and this one in particular had some very interesting points on the relative treatment of female characters in the movie vs. the poem.
My own reaction? Well, I'd gotten over the WTFfery of Angelina Jolie and her weird-ass put on accent as Grendel's mother by the time I'd seen the trailer twice, so I wasn't exactly expecting a strictly faithful adaptation. (I also wasn't expecting stiletto feet, but that's another matter.) Plus, it's been at least five years since I last read Seamus Heaney's beautiful translation of Beowulf, so I wasn't exactly freshly ready to be offended. It's actually one of the more interesting book to film adaptations I've seen recently, because it's so very aware of its differences. It's a layered adaptation that leaves a space for the poem itself in its own acknowledgment of the art of storytelling and in its implicit acknowledgment of the impossibility of creating an artistically successful and completely faithful transliteration of the poem to film. The demands of both the medium and the expected audience are just too different.
Beowulf is very much a twenty-first century movie, and not just in Zemeckis' absolute fascination with stretching the boundaries of a new medium. The modern fascination with technology shows up not just in the cool CGI and the novelty of having coins, mead, and spears hurled straight at the you in 3D, it shows up in the script, with Beowulf using the superior technology of a door and a bit of leverage to tear Grendel's arm off instead of actual brawn. Even with Beowulf as the big, brawny "hero" stripping naked to fight, it's still a triumph of brains and tech over brawn. Yet, the movie also manages to reflect the fear that we depend too much on technology, with Beowulf's loss of his sword and the necessity of tearing the Dragon's heart out with his bare hand. The movie also has a very postmodern attitude towards heroism and honor, and an entirely contempory fascination with idealized nudity. Just about everybody who reviews the movie ends up mentioning Angelina Jolie, and just about everybody who reviews the movie ends up cracking jokes about Austin Powers when mentioning Beowulf's fight with Grendel. The nudity is problematic on both occasions because it becomes the focus rather than the plot. I mean, did I mention Grendel's mum's stiletto feet? But, hey. At least they had eye candy on both sides, and both cases were just about equally unrealistic and distracting.
The modernity of the movie is also quite literate (which I suppose is to be expected, considering the screenwriters). It doesn't just respectfully yet uncomfortably refer to and then leave behind its source text, it draws from other texts as well. I haven't actually read more than a small bit of John Gardner's Grendel (I started it in the library as a teen, but decided not to check it out that day and it's been on my "to read" list ever since), but the movie Grendel is obviously indebted to it. Actually, I think my biggest problem with the adaptation was not its lack of similarity to the Old English epic, but its indebtedness to an Early Modern English play (overly Freudian interpretations of it, of course). Perhaps we should have a moratorium on screenwriters (mis)reading Hamlet for a while. (Daddy issues anyone? Wealhtheow as a weird mix of Gertrude and Ophelia?) Of all the things that seemed borrowed or shamefully stolen from Shakespeare, it was Wiglaf as Horatio that really annoyed me -- mainly because of the ambiguity of the ending. The ambiguous open ending actually really pisses me off, because it undercuts the one honest act of heroism that the screenplay allowed -- Beowulf becoming a hero in deed rather than in boast, by taking responsibility for his actions and dying to undo the damage his succumbing to temptation created. At least you got Beowulf breaking a bad cycle, if not being the hero portrayed in the poem. But with Wiglaf the faithful companion and silent observer ending standing on the shore holding the cup and obviously being tempted the same way by Grendel's mother, you don't even have the cleanly broken cycle. Not fair. They could have easily left us with the passing of an age, but they had to add a possible continuation of corruption.
All that aside, I was utterly seduced by the coolness factor. I like shiny things that make me go, "ooh, pretty!" They won't carry an entire movie by themselves if the plot is insultingly dumb, but they'll make me much more happy to watch a flawed movie. And thus, we come to the Dragon. Beowulf's fight with the dragon has got to be the coolest ever committed to film, and this is where the new tech really really shines. This is no Dragonheart. This is no puny, pathetic Reign of Fire. This is a seamless, convincing, and awesome dragon, and I would totally watch the film again just for that.