Letters to the Editor
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Too Bad about the movie
But remember that the first attempt to make LOTR was a cartoon version that was not very good. It does take a certain kind of genius to make an epic really well.
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The Double Resonance of the Past
This was really quite an insightful essay. You put your finger on what is so moving about the poem "Beowulf." It is the resonance of an old (to us) work that reflects on its own past, a past shrouded in half-forgotten myths. I find the poem so moving because of its ambiguity--human and monster, pagan and Christian, and a hero who deserves his fame, and yet he cannot tear his gaze away from the dragon's treasure at the end.
An even deeper level of the past exists in that the dragon hoards the treasure of a people long gone, just as the Geats soon will be, and as the Anglo-Saxon become. There is so much loss and yet heroic energy, and from the clips of the movie I've seen, the digital wizardry doesn't do a good job at capturing the emotion and ferocity. Unfortunately, Beowulf looks a bit silly screaming his name. He shouldn't look silly.
One small point to make -- Tolkien's Middle-Earth is also taken from the medieval notion of life here as Middle Earth, in that its between heaven and hell.
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Faded Copies
Wow—I think that Salon must have requested a temporary increase in bandwidth to run this essay! In any case, I feel that my handle, Elric, inspired by another master of fantasy (Michael Moorcock) makes me uniquely qualified to comment! Mr. Zemeckis' sins are indeed grave, and in Tolkien's world his punishment would probably be meted out by Balrogs or worse, but he is hardly alone in his transgressions. Beowulf is just the latest in a long line of hugely commercially successful bastardizations of all manner of classic works. This includes most of the recent Disney animations, along with the shamelessly derivative Shrek blockbusters. As Mr. Kamiya points out these attempts fail on so many artistic levels it hard to pick a place to start criticizing them. However, there is one weakness they all share.
In the old days before digital reproduction, when photocopying was the only way to replicate a document, you often experienced copy degradation. Someone writes a memo which is then copied as an attachment to someone else's report and on and on until you are dealing with copies of copies of copies. No joke: it would sometimes reach the point that the attached document became completely illegible, sparking a desperate search for the original (or at least one of the earlier generation copies).
The reason that monstrosities like Beowulf are so profitable is that we live in an age where neither the producers nor the consumers of these 'artistic works' have any real knowledge of the originals. The Lord of the Rings movies had to be good because the books' legions of fans would have taken the theaters apart: figuratively if not literally. However, I doubt that more than 5% of the population has either read Beowulf or possesses more than a passing knowledge of its plot.
About 6 years I taught 2 semesters of an introductory business class in a year-abroad program in Japan. The kids were mostly juniors from good schools in the U.S. and Europe. In one class I made a casual reference to the Odyssey. Blank looks and silence. I then mentioned the Iliad and Aeneid . Same reaction. It wasn't that the kids hadn't read these classics, they had never heard of them! Of course, they have been exposed to countless movies, TV shows, comic books and role playing games that contained elements of these classics, but they have only the fuzziest knowledge (if any) of the original works. It seems that in the 1980s we entered the era of remakes, and in the 2000s we are now doing remakes of remakes! As we go from copy to copy, these and other archetypal works will begin to fade into a distant and hazy collective memory, much like the myths that inspired them.
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The reason why Hollywood can't make a really good mythical movie
Is this: If it has a sex element, Hollywood has no concept of how to handle it with any subtlety.
If it has no sex element, or a very limited one, Hollywood feels the need to just ram it in there because, hey, that is the full summary of the depth of most Hollywood directors and writers.
Plus people just love watching actors kissing for two hours rather then advancing the plot.
If Hollywood was to actually do a myth right it would have to do the following:
Don't add stuff. Seriously, these are stories which survived by way of mouth for hundreds of years for a reason and anything you are likely to add to them will suck.
A battle has a much greater impact if you haven't already seen the same character taking down a dragon, two gorgons and the beast of aaaaaarg.
CG has a much better impact if you haven't already seen the said dragon, two gorgons and beast of aaaaaarg. Actors always look better then CG.
Talking, can be wasted. If something is happening on screen you don't need the characters to explain it to the audience, if it has happened you don't need to recap it, and if it has nothing to do with the story you don't need to include it. Also, as a special mention, swearing only has an impact if a character does it once.
Romance, when it fits fits but don't spend half the movie with characters smooching. It should not get in the way of the original plot, and if it doesn't fit it can simply be skipped.
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Beowulf
Beowulf isn't the earliest peice of vernacular European literature. Even if you date it to the 7th century (about the earliest date people have suggested), the very earliest Irish and Welsh material is as old a few decades older. If you date it to the 10th century, there's a huge amount of older Irish and Welsh material.
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I enjoyed the movie Beowulf
I am not sure what is more enjoyable about this article whether is the laughably pretentious mythic analysis or the hugely ironic use of Lord of the Rings as a comparison source material.I enjoyed the movie as it was entertaining precisely because it was not a high flown art house bore which the author of the article seems to think would have been the artistically and ideologically pure thing to do.I believe the author's real problem was that the movie was made to entertain people and used the conventions of the Hollywood action movie to do so. Paul Verhoeven faced exactly the same criticism of his film Black Book by European critics for applying the fast paced action idiom in what should have been in their view a heavy handed navel gazing screenplay instead.The poem Beowulf by most people's standard is boring and the need to use more conventional narrative tricks to make a movies that will appeal to a broad audience is self evident to all but the most die hard Humanities faulty members or Salon critics.The poem Beowulf will survive the Hollywood onslaught as it has survived the last 10 centuries.If anything it reminded me of the powerful film Excalibur by John Boorman from 1981.If a film can myth right it was that one much more so that LOTR.
The Lord of the Rings comparision is interesting as J.R.R. Tolkien was routinely hammered by critics for his little children's story that got way out of hand.There were suggestions from some critics that if LOTR was picked as book of the century(which it was) they would hang themselves.Still waiting though.It would seem that the art establishment doesn't go for hobbits and elves as much as animated Beowulfs.The Peter Jackson movie succeeded but one cannot call his film Tolkien's Lord of the Rings but Peter Jackson's bastardization of Lord of the Rings in that events or characters and their motives from the book were changed or removed to avoid his favorite phrase"dramatic suicide"The middle movie was nearly unwatchable with events rearranged so pointlessly you wondered what was wrong with Tolkien's clear concise storytelling.So the myth that the author saw in the movie was more Jackson's moviemaking myth than Tolkien's Anglo Saxon mythic rendering for his ambitious kid story.