Most of the reviews on "Beowulf and Grendel" are misleading -- this film isn't very good. Its obviously made by "arthouse-movie-people" so the cinematography is good but everything else is lacking (i.e., direction, script and pacing). I was disappointed because the script takes a lot of liberties with the actual story, so much so, that only the character names, locations and the ending (partly) are the same as the epic poem.
There's so many problems with this movie that for the sake of efficiency, I'm just going to list them:
1) The movie is too long. There's a lot of camera sweeps and landscape shots that add nothing to the story but plenty to the length of the film. I didn't want to watch a documentary on the Icelandic landscape, I wanted to see a movie with characters and a story.
2) The Sarah Polley subplot. Sarah Polley plays a witch who clues Beowulf as to why Grendel is attacking. But the witch subplot is forced and feels grafted onto the story. It should have been chopped because its unnecessary -- it seems like they just wanted Sarah Polley in the movie so they wrote this whole subplot just for her. And it was pretty disgusting in the end... if you think about it, it was really disgusting and I wonder just what the hell the film-makers were thinking. They have some serious, serious problems.
3) None of the characters are likable. They grumble, they scowl and they look despondent 90% of the time. There was no character development so there's no attachment as to what happens to them. Half the guys looked the same with long beards and scowls so you never knew who died.
4) The changes to the story were poor. There's a reason the story of Beowulf is considered an epic that has been remembered for hundreds of years -- its a great, great story. Did the film-makers really think that they slap a story together in a few months that would be better than an epic that has withstood the tests of time? If it ain't broke don't fix it, you can't improve on a work of art such as Beowulf, so why rewrite it? Its like repainting the Mona Lisa to add some zazz.
So, unless you like watching endless scenes of the Icelandic landscape and of bearded men, indistinguishable from each other, walking and riding through the Icelandic landscape while scowling, skip this snoozefest, you'll be glad you did.
There's so many problems with this movie that for the sake of efficiency, I'm just going to list them:
1) The movie is too long. There's a lot of camera sweeps and landscape shots that add nothing to the story but plenty to the length of the film. I didn't want to watch a documentary on the Icelandic landscape, I wanted to see a movie with characters and a story.
2) The Sarah Polley subplot. Sarah Polley plays a witch who clues Beowulf as to why Grendel is attacking. But the witch subplot is forced and feels grafted onto the story. It should have been chopped because its unnecessary -- it seems like they just wanted Sarah Polley in the movie so they wrote this whole subplot just for her. And it was pretty disgusting in the end... if you think about it, it was really disgusting and I wonder just what the hell the film-makers were thinking. They have some serious, serious problems.
3) None of the characters are likable. They grumble, they scowl and they look despondent 90% of the time. There was no character development so there's no attachment as to what happens to them. Half the guys looked the same with long beards and scowls so you never knew who died.
4) The changes to the story were poor. There's a reason the story of Beowulf is considered an epic that has been remembered for hundreds of years -- its a great, great story. Did the film-makers really think that they slap a story together in a few months that would be better than an epic that has withstood the tests of time? If it ain't broke don't fix it, you can't improve on a work of art such as Beowulf, so why rewrite it? Its like repainting the Mona Lisa to add some zazz.
So, unless you like watching endless scenes of the Icelandic landscape and of bearded men, indistinguishable from each other, walking and riding through the Icelandic landscape while scowling, skip this snoozefest, you'll be glad you did.