James Hynes

Here's a phrase I never thought would pass my lips at a ticket booth: "Beowulf 3-D, please." (What's next--Piers Plowman in Sensurround?) I went to see it because I thought it would be good, campy fun, and it turned out to be  better than that. Not a masterpiece, mind, but smarter and more compelling than all the talk of Grendel's mother's high heels had led me to believe.

After the novelty wore off (which took about 20 minutes), the 3-D itself was more of a distraction than anything else. No matter how high tech and digital they make it, it's still a cheesy, unrealistic effect from the 50s, like looking through a Viewmaster for two hours. And while the animation works spectacularly well for action scenes, it still has a way to go before it can adequately express human emotion on faces. Some came off better than others—Anthony Hopkins looked appropriately weary and drunken as the king, but John Malkovich as his devious adviser looked like one of the Geico cavemen. On the whole, the male characters were better served—their faces had grain and texture—but the women, and not just Grendel's mother, all had the untextured epidermis of sex dolls. Given that the entire film looks like a really slick video game, the kind where you dismember monsters, and given that the demographic of the film is likely to be mainly players of those games along with a few curious English lit majors, perhaps real-looking women might be too much to ask.

All that said, the movie plays fair with its source material. The changes in the story are not arbitrary Hollywood bullshit, but actually rather inventive and not especially anachronistic. Screenwriters Gaiman and Avary don't turn Beowulf into a wise-cracking 21st century action hero; they give him all the unironic boastfulness of the original. There is some wit, but most of it seems appropriate to 8th century warriors (or at least appropriate to a modern screenwriter's idea of the wit of 8th century warriors—some of the secondary warriors are lusty and loud in the manner of Ernest Borgnine in The Vikings).

But mainly the writers have intuited that even an 8th century warrior/king would not necessarily be averse to cutting a deal with a powerful adversary, as opposed to  just killing her. Gaiman and Avary have thought through the various subtexts here, as have Zemeckis and his animators: when Grendel's mother seduces Beowulf, for example, she melts his sword, if you know what I mean. Another clever touch is the way they incorporate the story's cultural context—pagan oral tale written down by Christians—and work it into their version by dramatizing in passing the first hints of the new religion. And it's also to their credit that while Grendel is truly, and rather imaginatively, hideous, he's also poignant. I'm not sure that the original authors intended it, but I've always felt sorry for poor Grendel, and I don't think I'm alone in that (see John Gardner's wonderful little novel Grendel). In this film he's driven mad by the racket the Danes make in their mead hall every night, like some poor loser living across the street from a frat house, and it's a measure of how far we've come as a civilization that if Grendel had had access to noise abatement ordinances and a good dermatologist, there might never have been anything to write about.

And if you don't care for animated 3-D, it's not like there's a dearth of Beowulfs. I can think of four versions, including an equally clever, though much lower budget Canadian/Icelandic production called Beowulf and Grendel, with Gerard Butler playing Beowulf in an almost impenetrable Glaswegian accent. And there's also one of my guilty pleasure movies, The 13th Warrior, which is Michael Crichton's imagining of what the historical basis of Beowulf might have been.