Beowulf : the monsters and the producers

Over the past few months I've watched a couple of different visual adaptations of the Beowulf legend.

Version number one was Beowulf and Grendel, a low-budget 2005 effort filmed on location on the gorgeously brutal coast of Iceland. I wanted to like this movie. I really did. But it's hard to like a grim medieval revenge-saga that veers (unintentionally?)into Monty Python territory as often as this one does.

There are some good points. The scenery is gorgeous, all towering jagged black rocky cliffs and rumpled, rocky Nordic pastures. The film's portrayal of Hrothgar as a ineffectual, sodden old man and his "kingdom" as little more than a collection of crude wooden buildings thrown up on the edge of the known world makes sense. And the actors, most of whom sport Scandinavian names positively bristling with umlauts and phlegm-hawking clusters of consonants that could have been lifted straight from the Elder Edda, are convincing medieval barbarians. They look scary; their accents sound scary; their scowls and snarls are scary; and the film's makeup-and-grunge artistry convinced me that they probably smelled scary, too. Genghis Khan would think twice about tackling these guys.

Unfortunately, the spell is broken whenever the script rears its ugly head. The script attempts to blend vulgar modern slang with medieval attitude, and the result all too often trips over the edge of self-parody. "I tell ya, this troll must be one tough prick," says one of the stalwart soldiers in the midst of a strategic conference. In another excruciating, Monty-Python-like conversation, Beowulf chats with a half-crazed old fisherman while they chow down on boiled eels. Beowulf discovers that an eel has slithered inside his boot and munched on his foot while he floated in the ocean, clad in furs and armor. The old fisherman tosses the anthropophagic eel into the pot with the rest. Handing a bit of the concoction to Our Hero, he wheezes "Be-yo'-self!" As in, indirectly eat yourself, thus "being" oneself.

Hardy har.

Also unfortunately, the filmmakers have tried to graft typically modern attitudes onto the bones of the ancient legend. In a prologue pretentiously entitled "A Hate Is Born", we see that Grendel is not evil, he's just a misunderstood victim of violent prejudice. We also meet a pretty feminist witch with a Canadian accent who doesn't mind humping men, trolls, or much of anything else that crawls into her solitary hovel, plus a bizarrely warped version of Hrothgar's generous queen, Wealtheow, who in the filmmakers' imagination has become a dour middle-aged harridan plotting to murder her husband. (Inexplicably but mercifully, this plot threat is dropped with no further explanation or development.)

Fiend suggested that I should take a look at the version of the Beowulf story presented in a couple of episodes of Star Trek : Voyager. It was better than Beowulf & Grendel, which is admittedly setting a rather low standard. ST:V's producers won't win any awards for authenticity from me, if only because they insisted on adding a female warrior to their holodeck-Heorot, along with gratuitous references to Freya. But at least the framing-story involving the Voyager crew made some sense once allowance was made for the usual Star Trek technobabble.

Good grief, though... why can't anybody seem to do this story right? It's not as if it's a complicated story!