If you want to see a good fantasy flick, sort of like Shrek with a darker flavor, then go see Beowulf. The fight scenes with Grendel and the Dragon are excellent.

If you want to understand the epic poem, there are better ways to spend your time. I'm slated to teach Beowulf to my seventh grade humane letters class next quarter, so I spent a good chunk of last summer studying up on it. This made me especially anxious to see what they would do with a movie version. I picked up the comic book serialization at Readers' Copies, so I wasn't surprised when I actually saw the story on screen.

What qualities make a free man worthy of respect? What makes a king a good king? How should we respond when bad things happen to good people? These are the themes that drive the epic. The qualities admired in the Middle Ages were prowess, loyalty, generousity and courtesy. The poem of Beowulf shows us that the valuation of these qualities were not imposed by some ideal in the Middle Ages, but grew out of the conditions of life experienced by people north of the Alps in the Dark Ages. These qualities were different in some ways from the qualities admired by the classical Greeks and Romans. Our American culture today owes more to the qualities of the north than to the classical qualities of the south.

However... since World War I, the anti-heroic seems to dominate, with a few exceptions such as The Lord of the Rings.

SPOILER ALERT!!! SPOILER ALERT!!! Do not read on if you want to be surprised by anything in the movie!!!

The writers of the Beowulf movie turn all of the major male characters into anti-heroes. Evil doesn't happen to people because that is the nature of life in this present evil age. Evil happens because no red-blooded male can resist doing the deed with Grendel's mom, and then lying about it afterwards! Grendel is Hrothgar's son. The Dragon is Beowulf's son. We never find out who Wiglaf's son is going to be, but as the movie ends, we know there is going to be one.

Grendel and the Dragon are pretty good monsters (except the Dragon looks a little too much for my taste like Godzilla from the version with Matthew Broderick), but Grendel's mom just seems silly, if you can picture a nekkid Angelina Jolie as looking silly. She has a prehensile braid that she doesn't really do anything with, and stilletto heels growing out of her feet. She's covered with some kind of golden fluid which is always running off of her body except over the strategic parts. Speaking of strategic parts, the animators didn't do a very good job of reproducing the effects of gravity on her upper story female appurtenances, which was another thing that made the graphics remind me of Shrek.

According to the movie, Beowulf's outstanding feats of bravery and prowess (exaggeration, the figure of speech hyperbole, was to spoken sagas what special effects are to Hollywood movies) were nothing more than the blowhard tales of a lying, glory hungry braggart.

Sad.

And it's not just because it's a movie done in comic book style. I really liked 300.

-- Steve Lortz

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