Letters to the Editor
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Sturla Gunnarson's 2005 version is pretty close to the source material
You should check it out.
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the last line made my morning
This is a beautiful article, about a beautiful essay.
It's such a shame about the film-- if anyone can do it, Neil Gaiman should have been able to (his writing is one of the few obsessions from my teenage years that has survived the cold scrutiny of adulthood). And yet, somehow, not.
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an era caught between paganism and Christianity
Yes and no. The Danes nominally adopted Christianity in the early 9th C but didn't begin to practice it until nearly the year 1000. But Anglo Saxons writing about the Danes would have overlayed their own already hundreds of years old Christian tradition onto the Danish lore. In other words there's a bit of replacement theology going on here.
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Gaiman and Avary
Gaiman didn't do this screenplay by himself. Roger Avary had a hand as well. Certain sections of the film (the good ones, IMHO) had a definite Gaiman-esque feel to them. The characterization of Grendel for instance, and the Gaiman over-theme of the importance of stories and how they define us. Given the high quality of his prior work, I have to question exactly how much of what made it on screen was his work.
Zemeckis deserves the lion's share of the blame, here. The frenetic camera work , the cutesy-poo 'hide the weiner' game, the schlocky 'OMG! A pointy thing right in my face! IN 3D!' scenes, these are all his fault. More importantly, Zemeckis's near obsession with performance capture CGI geegaws leaves the film populated with dead eyed marionettes and not real characters. One day, this technology might be seamless and perfect. But until then, the "uncanny valley" spoils things.
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Oh, Waa, Waa, Waa...
Gee, Hollywood couldn't make an exact replica of a generally inaccessible (to the lay public) epic poem/saga? Go figure...
Anyone who EXPECTS a film to somehow replicate such a murky and intense literary work deserves to have their head examined. Anyone who expects a film to replicate such a murky and intense literary work and then whines on ad nauseum that the result isn't sufficiently a mirror image (after admitting that similar such attempts at replication have been disastrous, no less) needs to first get a clue and THEN have their head examined. Or, better yet, go MAKE their fantasy ideal of an exact reanimation of literature to film into a reality.
Well, we know that won't happen. It's so much easier to carp and type pithy critiques feverishly into a computer than to actually do anything productive...
Comparing literature and film is like comparing painting to sculpture. You can produce fine works in any of those media and each can be (indeed, is entitled to be) it's own separate work of art. That's not to say that works in different media cannot or should not be compared, but to expect one to ape the other is absurd at best and both pointless and disingenuous at worst.
By the way, any truth to the rumor that the Epic of Gilgamesh will be the next big screen blockbuster?
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Bravo
I feel a helluva lot less lonely staring out at the sea this morning, Gary.
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You Think LOTR Wasn't Schlock, Too?
Please, LOTR was as schlocky and faux-heroic as Beowulf. Either enjoy them for what they are - vapid Hollywood blockbusters - or shut up and stop wanking. There was nothing terribly deep or meaningful in LOTR aside from the fact that a fanboy director pandered to all the legions of fanboys by staying as true to the original texts as possible. Yawn.
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Has Kamiya Ever Actually READ Beowulf?
If so, then surely he understands that the surviving epic that's come down to us has no actual conclusion - it's a hanging narrative.
Not sure how he expects anyone to make a satisfying film without manipulating the text a bit.
Would he have been happier if Seamus Heaney had written the screenplay?
What a stupid essay.
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A sense of myth
Gary, what a wonderful article to start the morning! You've definitely hit the target, too. There are so few filmmakers today who truly understand the essence of the mythic, who prefer hotties to mysteries, action to heroic tragedy, glossy surace to depth.
Elric O M, I wholeheartedly second your insightful comments. I'm old enough to recall literary & mythic references as a matter of course in film & TV -- for example, I recently saw some old episodes of "Route 66" & was delighted to hear so many of them. Obviously the writers, producers, and networks expected the majority of their audience to get & understand them as well.
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Huh?
Why should Zemeckis create a mythical universe around Beowulf? True, it's a legend and not history, but it is deemed to have taken place on our Earth, in real time under the laws of physics as we understand them, etc. Beowulf happened in our world, not some fanciful alternate universe.
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Lord of the Rings and Beowulf movies are very different in concept and execution
Perhaps one reason why Robert Zemeckis took a radically different approach to "Beowulf" than Peter Jackson did to "Lord of the Rings" was to avoid this kind of comparison between the films! Jackson was wildly successful in bringing Middle-earth and its inhabitants to life because he paid close attention to its physical aspects, creating props and sets with an insane degree of detail. Middle-earth is a character in Jackson's films as much as Gandalf, Frodo and the rest of the gang are. While he did occasionally get carried away with technology, grounding his movie in the physical gave it badly-needed versimilitude and allowed it to overcome some of his poor decisions about how to adapt Tolkien's text.
If Zemeckis had gone this route, he'd have been viewed as a Jackson wannabe (and probably an unsuccessful one at that). Instead, he took the opposite approach, abandoning the physical and boldly using CGI not only for backgrounds, creatures and effects but for the actors themselves -- thus risking a plunge into the uncanny valley. He had the advantage of Jackson in that his audience brought fewer preconceptions to the film; Jackson in hiring two of the most popular Tolkien illustrators as concept artists for his film went out of his way to make his movie be consistent with fan expectations.
We can certainly argue whether Zemeckis' approach to "Beowulf" was successful or whether it's true to the spirit of the original poem. (I have read and listened to Seamus Heany's "Beowulf" translation but haven't seen the movie yet, so for the time being I withold my judgement.) But I think we need to recognize how different his thinking was from Jackson's. Perhaps a better movie to compare to "Beowulf" would be "300" -- both in its warrior ethos, its roots in the past, and its filmmaking approach.
And it's not as if Zemeckis went out and burned everyone's copy of "Beowulf" -- to carry on Tolkien's analogy, the stones of the original tower are still there, waiting for someone to reassemble them, climb to the top, and catch a new glimpse of the sea.