The Saga of Failed BeowulfsAh, the epic poem of Beowulf. One of the few stories I didn’t mind studying in school, because it wasn’t boring. It was about a dude who kills monsters and dragons. That’s the opposite of boring! So in theory, I’d be all over any and all film adaptations of this thing, right? If I like the story (well, I didn’t hate it like I did the Crucible or the Scarlet Letter. But I won’t delude myself and say I really loved Beowulf. I haven’t read it in something like 8 years.), then in theory, I’d really like movies based on the text, right? Well, that’s the thing. For some reason, nobody can seem to make a decent Beowulf movie. People have tried (and I suspect some people have tried to NOT try when they were making their movie), but I don’t think anyone has really gotten there yet.
Of course this first begs a question. Does an adaptation have to be a faithful adaptation in order to be a good film? Of course the answer is no. But it’s frustrating when you have so many different movie versions of this story (and even versions that I won’t be covering today), and NONE of them can even adequately adapt the original text into a cool movie. Normally that sort of thing doesn’t bother me (see comics, where I usually don’t mind seeing changes made from the page to the screen), but when there is not a single faithful adaptation of the original story, that’s not cool, dude. So in today’s article, I’ll be judging 3 of the Beowulf movies of the last 20 years on how faithful they were in their adaptation, as well as how good of a movie they were in general. So the first one I’ll be talking about is the most recent one, and is also the best. 2007’s Beowulf, starring Angelina Jolie, Ray Winstone, and Anthony Hopkins was a CGI-animated theatrical film that came the closest to bringing the original story to the screen. It has the fewest deviations out of the three I’m talking about here, but the deviations it has are huge. Neil Gaiman, yes THAT Neil Gaiman, was a screenwriter for this bad boy, and he pointed out that the story of Beowulf is problematic, because it’s 2 unconnected stories with the same character. First, Beowulf kills a monster, then the monster’s mom, then a few decades later, he dies fighting a dragon. 
Beowulf, 2007
So Gaiman reasoned that the story, as it exists in the poem, is pretty much unfilmable. In any good film, you have a 3 act structure. And those acts need to feed organically from one to another. Your third act doesn’t need to be 30, 40 years later and have nothing to do with the previous 2. So Gaiman chose to connect the dragon story to the other 2 by embellishing the story. He says the poem was translated by prudish monks, and he was just restoring what he claims they probably took away. (Now who knows how much of that is him being serious and how much of it is him having a good laugh) So in this version of the story, Beowulf is a compulsive liar, and that’s how the film explains Beowulf swimming in full armor for days at a time, like he says he did in the poem. And when Beowulf goes alone to kill Grendel’s mother in the cave, he actually doesn’t kill her, and instead has sex with her, just as Hrothgar, the useless king of the land, did some decades earlier. So the Dragon is actually Beowulf’s son. And the whole movie is about how violence against monsters is all one big cycle and is never ending. Because it hints that Wiglaf, Beowulf’s friend and the heir to the throne after Beowulf dies, will sleep with Grendel’s mother next. (or will he? It is also hinted that Wiglaf lost a son to Grendel’s mother, so would he be that willing to hit that?) The thing is, Gaiman is right. The poem of Beowulf is pretty unfilmable. So you either find a way to make the Dragon portion of the story flow naturally from the rest of the story, or you leave it as is and it feels really tacked on and unnecessary. (the other 2 Beowulf movies on this list chose a different tactic regarding the Dragon, in completely leaving it out and adding more material to the Grendel/Grendel’s mom portion of the story) Now despite what I said about movies being a three act endeavor and they all need to be connected, I don’t know if that’s entirely true. John Boorman’s Excalibur got away with being an epic that spanned something like 50 years. Now admittedly, I think that was the biggest problem with Boorman’s Excalibur, but I guess it’s possible that a movie COULD do something like that and make it work. Maybe make your entire movie be about Beowulf and his dissatisfaction at how easy it is to kill monsters, and he wants a challenge or something. Then you flash forward 30 years or so, and Beowulf finally gets to die in combat, and he’s happy. I don’t know, maybe it’d suck. Who am I to question Neil Gaiman? But anyway, this movie is the closest to a faithful adaptation, and even if you wish it could have been closer, it’s still a pretty rocking movie anyway. But that’s to be expected from Robert Zemeckis, Neil Gaiman and the aforementioned actors. The next best Beowulf movie is considerably less awesome. Beowulf & Grendel, from 2005, starring Gerard Butler, Stellan Skarsgård and Tony Curran, is just a really depressing cinematic experience. When I think of Beowulf, I think of awesome fights with monsters. I want it to be a fun thing to watch. So what did director Sturla Gunnarsson decide to do? He made a really bleak movie about a group of humans who hunt a troll for no real reason, and then the troll’s kid, Grendel, grows up and is harassing the humans. Then Beowulf comes in and continually tries to kill Grendel, who eventually dies when he cuts his own arm off to get away from Beowulf. Beowulf also finds out the town witch (not from the source material) has a kid with Grendel. Beowulf decides not to kill Grendel’s kid (though he does kill Grendel’s mom, who attacks him for some reason), and then I guess that’s the closest thing the movie has to a happy ending. 
Beowulf & Grendel, 2005
The original story didn’t try to assign complex motivations to Grendel. He attacked Herot because he didn’t like the loud noises of their partying. He’s a big dumb monster, he doesn’t need complex motivations! But this movie wants to make the humans the bad guys, and Grendel just a victim of circumstance. But at the same time, it also wants Beowulf to be a nice guy, so he doesn’t actually kill Grendel. The only time he kills anything is in self-defense. This movie is considerably different than the source material, but that’s not what makes it a bad movie. It’s bad because it’s inconsistent. Hrothgar didn’t kill Grendel, Grendel grows up and starts killing Danes. But then at the end of the movie, the witch tells Beowulf that because he didn’t kill her and Grendel’s son, that everything was okay. Um, what changed between the beginning of the movie and the end? It’s a bad movie because it painfully lacks anything even kinda resembling cool action scenes of heroes killing monsters. It’s GOT monsters in it (or really, big hairy dudes the other people call Trolls), but there’s hardly any actions scenes with said monsters. The whole thing is just a bleak unfun experience I wouldn’t want to wish on anyone. So if that’s how awful the second best Beowulf movie on this list is, how bad is the worst one? 
Beowulf, 1999
Beowulf from 1999, that’s how bad. This movie stars Christopher Lambert, Rhona Mitra, and Oliver Cotton, and it just about broke my brain. This movie is described as a “sci-fi update” on the epic poem, which sounds really cool. When I hear that, I’m thinking that the Danes live on one planet, the Geats live on another, and they travel to and fro on space ships instead of sea-ships. Maybe Grendel is an alien instead of an earth-born monster. Maybe the Dragon is as big as a planet and Beowulf goes down fighting it in one of the small one-man ships. I don’t know, it could be really cool, with a budget and some decent actors (neither of which this movie has, by the by). But this movie is “sci-fi” in the same way that Barney is sci-fi. It’s all set on one planet, everyone is still wearing armor, and the weapons, while they look a little out of place for the 6th century, are not sci-fi in the least. In fact, I was convinced this was just really bad research where the director and costume department had no idea what weapons and fashions existed in the 6th century until I saw the PA system announcing that everyone was safely locked in the castle. This movie really feels like some c-list production company had some leftover money from another movie and they cobbled together movie without putting any thought into it. Maybe I’m not being entirely fair. I did like the design for Grendel. In fact, of the three movies on this list, this is probably my favorite Grendel. It’s basically if Doomsday from DC Comics had a baby with a Predator. Unfortunately, it’s barely in the movie, and other than in one scene, when it is in the movie, it’s not very easy to tell how it looks. The thing is, even though this movie is an affront to humanity, with better actors and budget, this could have been an okay movie if they had abandoned the whole Beowulf thing. A demigod warrior worried about turning evil, so he fights evil to prevent himself from turning to the dark side? That’s not bad. Setting it in a post apocalyptic setting? If they had made it more apparent that it WAS a post apocalyptic setting, that could’ve been alright, too. I really think what makes this movie such a chore is that it’s trying to be a really awful barely remake of Beowulf. If it had just shucked that ball and chain, it could have been an okay cheesy sci-fantasy flick. Not a GREAT movie, but decent, maybe. So that’s that. There’s other Beowulf movies out there (A TV miniseries from this year I didn’t know about, which maybe speaks volumes about its quality if it slid under everybody’s notice). So maybe someday I’ll find my perfect Beowulf. But I guess right now I’ll have to settle for what we have. 
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