For the last two weekends, I spent several hours dutifully watching every
Beowulf movie I've been able to get my hands on in order to write about them in my paper for the Beowulf class. These include the Avary/Gaiman/Zemeckis
Beowulf,
Beowulf and Grendel, the Christopher Lambert
Beowulf,
The 13th Warrior, and Benjamin Bagby's performance of the poem.
With the exception of Bagby (which is
fascinating), they're pretty much all terrible. And I mean
terrible. Too much liberty has been taken with the thematic and narrative material, the acting tends to be clunky, people aren't even trying for period accents (Sarah Polley's isn't even
European. She's not even
trying). . . . I could go on. And I will, when I write the paper. The only one that's remotely worth watching is
The 13th Warrior--and that's only
incidentally about
Beowulf. Without the
Beowulf connections, it's just sort of
there (as witnessed by its 33% on Rotten Tomatoes--none of the critics seemed to pick up on the
Beowulf material in the movie).
I think I've figured out two major issues with the adaptations so far. First, everyone keeps trying to find a
reason for Grendel's attacks on the Danes. There are reasons in the poem, of course, but they're not ones that modern audiences will necessarily connect to--to the point that it looks, to some readers, like Grendel is just a rampaging monster with no motivation for his actions. This is pretty far from the truth, but it's an understandable misconception. So filmmakers give him motivation, most frequently that Hrothgar is his father and Grendel feels wronged by him somehow. Pulling on typical, modern, Freudian ideas that everything comes back to sex and parentage, we have two movies with Grendel's mother being
hot. In the Lambert
Beowulf, she's played by a former Playboy playmate; in the Zemeckis
Beowulf, by Angelina Jolie. This opens up all sorts of interesting questions about the perception of sexually attractive women as monstrous and predatory that I won't go into right this second (but may end up in this paper). In
Beowulf and Grendel, he attacks because he's been wronged; he kills Danes because they killed his father, but not Hrothgar because Hrothgar spared Grendel. He doesn't attack the Geats until they go into his cave and destroy his father's head, lovingly placed on a shrine, and then he only kills Hondshew, who's the one who did the destroying. Here, he's a misunderstood minority who would have been better off left alone. And we still have the hot, morally ambiguous woman in Sarah Polley's Danish-yet-American-accented witch woman.
The other is that the movies tend to try to make
Beowulf into an action/adventure flick. It makes sense; there's lots of blood and thunder going on in the poem. But there's quite a bit more to it than that, and I think other themes, ideas, and messages get lost in the thud and blunder of the movies.
So I have decided that, in order to work,
Beowulf needs to be a horror movie.
In horror movies, the motivation of the monster is secondary, even unnecessary. They're coming to get you, Barbara, and it doesn't matter why, because when they get here they're going to kill you. Also, the poet has included some very dark, tense sequences which are begging to be utilized in a movie. It may need to be a two-parter; the disconnect in the action between Grendel and his mother and the dragon make a natural breaking point. I could even be convinced that it would need to be a trilogy.
Above all, the writers and director would need to avoid making Grendel a sympathetic character. It is this failing, in my opinion, that kills
Beowulf films dead.
The 13th Warrior stands up pretty well because the Wendol are very nearly mindless killing machines. There's no real motivation there. But it falls short of being a good
Beowulf movie because it's not technically a
Beowulf movie; it's a movie based on a book that was only secondarily interested in the Beowulf legend.
The Christopher Lambert
Beowulf comes pretty close to the horror movie ideal, but the setting is odd (medieval-steam-punky), the music is ridiculous (industrial electronic club music for the fight scenes), and the writing and acting are atrocious.
Beowulf is definitely more horror movie material than action/adventure or even sword-and-sorcery. While elements of both of these could easily be worked in, it needs, above all, to have a sense of dread, of the thing in the night coming to eat you in your bed, of inescapable fear and horror.
