Movies - Beowulf & Grendel

[Scrivener]

Well, I had hoped to catch this in cinemas during it's limited release in LA, but it was so limited that no LA theatres ever found out they should play it.

So jump forward to this afternoon. I'm in Walmart and the DVD just jumps off the shelf at me. Figuratively speaking, of course. I had no idea the movie was even coming to DVD. Apparently, the Canadian version has been out since June. Shoot, I would have ordered that one had I known.

Anyhoo, I was there to pick up The Proposition (search this forum for my review) and just had to get both. This adaptation of the great english novel is moderately faithful to material. For a movie that tries to do the whole "this is the historically accurate version of the famous legend" thing, it fails miserably towards the end. It's really a shame, because three quarters of the movie is positively wonderful. The acting is great, the sets and costumes are all historically dead on (if a bit too ornate for the period), and the locations are positively stunning (they should be, the crew went through hell to film on location in Iceland).

Instead of covering the whole Beowulf tale, this focuses only on the Grendel bits, ending with Grendel's mother. The filmakers take some creative license by introducing a "witch" character - one the movies biggest problems - that was intended to give some unity to the story, but only succeeds in being contrived and unneccesary. For starters, she is the only character in the entire movie with a jarring american accent (the rest of the cast is irish, with heavy accents), she's also not much of an actor, and her character could have easily been edited out of the whole movie for the better.

Also, this film's "natural" ending is with the death of Grendel. However, it keeps going for another 20 minutes as Grendel's mother shows up to kick some butt. While it's sort of fun, it feels excessive and wanton. Worse, the whole witch thing turns into this whole messy non-canon plot twist that the movie was ultimately better off without.

Anyhoo, perfect 10 for the first 80 minutes, 2/10 for the last 20. Taken as a whole, I'd give this a 7.7/10.