Beowulf

By now, everyone knows about Beowulf, if only because they were forced to read it in high school. Judging from the audio track of the DVD, some folks clearly resented having to read the "boring" heroic saga of a man who rips a troll's arm off with his bare hands, slays its monstrous mother, becomes king, and later dies fighting a dragon.

There's some odd defensiveness about Beowulf from the directors. This movie isn't JUST going to be about Beowulf, it will have a tightly wrapped story from beginning to end! It won't JUST be about a hero slaying monsters, it will be about father and son guilt, mother and son pride, and the lies they tell each other! There won't JUST be actors, there will be beautifully rendered superbly animated avatars! It won't JUST be a movie, it will be a movie in 3-D!

For the most part, it works. Beowulf and the king who hires him to slay Grendel are at times drunken louts and macho warriors. Grendel isn't just a disgusting monster, he's a piteous troll-child that throws a deadly tantrum. And Grendel's mother? Mmm, Grendel's mother is a delicious golden-skinned incubus who actually sprouts high heels (because, hey, human isn't her real form anyway so why not?) and a slinky tail. Gone is the random moment when Beowulf finds the sword that will slay Grendel's mother just laying around in her treasure horde, a situation I always found a little lazy on the part of the mysterious author. Replacing the somewhat jumbled juxtaposition of heroic mythology and Christian values is a tale of men tempted by lust and greed who go on to father the demons that ultimately destroy them.

The three-dimensional effects are lost on my television, a problem that's going to only become more prevalent as movie theaters give up trying to compete with DVDs and switch to gimmicks like 3-D. This makes some scenes more amusing than exciting, like when a flagpole juts towards the screen at the viewer.

The computer graphics, while breathtaking, seem to be almost beside the point. Yes, it's great that we have Jolie in all her near-naked glory. But why bother recreating her in CGI at all? When you watch the making-of docs, the actors acted with props, right down to Crispin Glover tossing dolls around as Grendel. Was that really necessary? Do we really care how realistically a warrior swings a lamp (a weighted prop, in case you're wondering) or Grendel tears a man in two?

Perhaps the most grating attribute of the DVD is the insistence that Beowulf was "boring." That somehow, the producers have made Beowulf better, because reading is dumb and so is high school. Maybe it's the English major in me, but I found the tone condescending.

If you can look past that, Beowulf's an entertaining if somewhat gory tale. But with its gratuitous nudity, buckets of gore, and significant changes to the plot, it's not going to be shown in high school English classes any time soon.