[REVIEW] Beowulf
Dec. 5th, 2007 07:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rfmcdonaldThe recent film Beowulf ranks a seven or an eight out of ten. Motion capture did a good job of integrating the CGI with the human actors, although Robin Wright Penn's face looked like that of a high-end computer game character from the late 1990s.
The movie differs hugely from the original epic poem in that Beowulf does not slay Grendel's mother but instead impregnates her and lies about killing her, becoming the father of the dragon in the poem's third part who visits death on the land.
Gaiman has introduced problematic sexuality into established literary canons before: His short story "The Problem of Susan" is a rather subversible and (to some) offensive take on the character of Susan Pevensie and Aslan in
The Chronicles of Narnia. I'm inclined to think that his treatment of Beowulf works, by knitting the somewhat disjointed third part into the remainder of the narrative, and by allowing for interesting parallels between the decline of Beowulf's heroic age and the temptations that lead to the apparently literal infertility of Beowulf and his predecessor Hrothgar. The past is seductive; the past kills.
The movie differs hugely from the original epic poem in that Beowulf does not slay Grendel's mother but instead impregnates her and lies about killing her, becoming the father of the dragon in the poem's third part who visits death on the land.
Gaiman has introduced problematic sexuality into established literary canons before: His short story "The Problem of Susan" is a rather subversible and (to some) offensive take on the character of Susan Pevensie and Aslan in
The Chronicles of Narnia. I'm inclined to think that his treatment of Beowulf works, by knitting the somewhat disjointed third part into the remainder of the narrative, and by allowing for interesting parallels between the decline of Beowulf's heroic age and the temptations that lead to the apparently literal infertility of Beowulf and his predecessor Hrothgar. The past is seductive; the past kills.
