Movie: Beowulf and Grendel

[amedia]

When we went to rent Beowulf, we ran into one of TODS' Mythology students working at the store, who recommended this other movie as being much better, so we snagged both.

Definitely not animated - this was gorgeously filmed in Iceland with real people. I kept thinking Beowulf was played by Christopher Lambert, but it was Gerard Butler. It was a very laconic movie, very spare; it didn't spell everything out, but gave the audience credit for being able to put things together. I do wish they'd had subtitles or closed captions (they had neither) - the characters were sometimes hard to understand. They took liberties with the story, of course, but in a more thoughtful and interesting way than the one we just saw. And the meadhall looked more like a medieval meadhall and less like Meduseld (from The Two Towers).

I liked the witch/seeress character - I liked the idea of this magically-powerful, socially-powerless woman whose outcast status gave her a kind of freedom - but I wasn't happy with the actress they picked. Her Canadian (indistinguishable from American) accent and her acting style (sort of like a hostile witness on Law and Order) set her apart from the rest of the movie, not in a good way. She should have been weird and scary and cool, and instead she was kinda Mary Sue-ish and annoying. Although I would say she got better as the movie went on.

TODS and I had a long talk afterwards on how both movies changed Grendel in such a way as to take away his essential Otherness and the inevitability of the battle between cosmos and chaos; while it makes for an interesting drama to have a monster who is himself fathered by a "good guy" (as in the more recent Beowulf) or who only attacks to avenge himself on a wrongful act by the "good guys" (in Beowulf & Grendel - in fact, Hrothgar, in both movies, is the father/instigator of the monster), it's a very different conflict than the original epic, archetypal battle. Oddly enough, we found a parallel in the way ST:NG ruined humanized the Borg, taking away what made them such powerful antagonists.

- THIS IS REALLY SPOILERY -

I also thought there was an interesting step taken in Beowulf & Grendel with Selma having a half-troll child, of cosmos overcoming chaos not by vanquishing it in a traditional battle, but by co-opting it and civilizing it - in a few generations you wouldn't even know there had been a troll ancestor.