Monster mash

Viking hero Beowulf (Ray Winstone) sets out to battle another monster in the animated epic Beowulf. (Paramount Pictures)

When Irish poet Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf was published several years ago, one reviewer summed up the original Anglo-Saxon epic as “brainless macho trash.” If that’s the case, it’s a wonder it wasn’t turned into a Hollywood blockbuster sooner. 

The medieval tale of a superhuman hero who battles trolls and dragons has had a few previous screen incarnations — most recently, 2005’s silly Beowulf and Grendel, a Canada-Iceland co-pro starring 300’s Gerard Butler. But now, thanks perhaps to the huge success of the Lord of the Rings films, we finally have a big-budget version of the 1,300-year-old poem that inspired Rings author J.R.R. Tolkien. Robert Zemeckis’s new Beowulf is a $150-million, digitally animated spectacle, with major marquee names Anthony Hopkins and Angelina Jolie, and jaw-dropping, state-of-the-art 3-D effects.

What would Tolkien have thought of this sexed-up, gore-soaked and ostensibly improved version? As the great Beowulf scholar who argued for the importance of the story’s three monsters, Tolkien would have liked the way they’ve been vividly conceived here by Zemeckis and his creative cohorts. Grendel, Beowulf’s first and most famous enemy, is authentically nightmarish, a twisted mess of raw sinews and weeping sores who comes off like a mash-up of Gollum, Skeletor and a figure from a Francis Bacon painting. The dragon, our hero’s final foe, is a bit more conventional, but still a golden-scaled, flame-belching world-beater who’d give Smaug a run for his treasure.

Less likely to get the Tolkien stamp of approval, though, is the middle monster, Grendel’s Mother. Traditionally seen as an ugly hag (although experts disagree about her description in the Old English text), she is envisioned here as a nude, statuesque temptress, played with purring seductiveness and a vaguely Scandinavian accent by the pulchritudinous Jolie. Granted, she is a tad freakish, what with cloven feet that look like stiletto heels and a sinuous serpent’s tail that doubles as a long braid.

The original Beowulf, like Tolkien’s writings, is remarkably sexless. But that hasn’t deterred the canny Zemeckis, one of Hollywood’s most successful directors (Back to the Future, Forrest Gump), who knows his film’s primarily adult-male audience will want some eye candy between all the bloodletting.

As for the story improvements, they aren’t the kind that Tolkien and other literary scholars would countenance. They’re the sort of changes Hollywood scriptwriters like Roger Avary (Pulp Fiction) and graphic novelists like Neil Gaiman (Sandman) make to clear away the murk and mystery of an ancient legend and give it a kind of Actors Studio logic. (Imagine Grendel asking a director: “OK, so I attack the mead hall and kill everybody. What’s my motive?”)

Queen Wealthow (Robin Wright Penn, left) appears in one of Beowulf's dreams. (Paramount Pictures)

As in the original tale, the young Beowulf and his fellow Geat warriors sail from Sweden to Denmark to do battle with Grendel, the man-eating troll who is terrorizing King Hrothgar and his court in the great hall of Heorot. However, in Gaiman and Avary’s re-conception, after Beowulf defeats Grendel and the troll’s water-dwelling mother wreaks revenge, he doesn’t slay her but instead cuts a Faustian deal that shapes the remainder of his life. The writers also provide a direct link between the Grendels and the dragon that Beowulf faces in his final battle. Thus the oddities and lacunae of the original poem are neatly filled in and explained, complete with that most Hollywood of touches — the hint of a sequel.

To their credit, Gaiman and Avery try to make the characters a bit more complex. This Beowulf, played with gruff self-confidence by British actor Ray Winstone, is brave but flawed, a braggart and a liar who lets his libido get in the way of his better judgment. The Grendel of Crispin Glover, meanwhile, is a pained and pathetic mama’s boy under all that pus and drool, a conception that clearly owes a debt to John Gardner’s memorable 1971 novel Grendel, which took the monster’s point of view.

The blue-chip cast also features Hopkins, not so much chewing as swilling the scenery as a mead-sodden Hrothgar; Robin Wright Penn as his blond trophy wife, Wealthow; and John Malkovich, doing his made-to-order slimy shtick as the gadfly Unferth. Even so, they mostly play second fiddle to the animation and in-your-face 3-D effects. Zemeckis employs a refined version of the “performance capture” technique he first used in the family film The Polar Express (2004), with the actors’ appearances, movements and voices altered and enhanced by digital manipulation. Among other things, it allows for the short, beefy Winstone to tower with Schwarzenegger abs, and for Jolie to do a nude scene without actually taking off her clothes.

The 3-D is at times utilized superbly to create deep perspectives, at other times to fall back on a gimmick as old as House of Wax: throwing things at the camera lens and seemingly into our faces. It’s cool at first, but after awhile, you do get tired of having yet another flaming arrow or battleaxe come hurtling toward you.

As a testosterone-fueled thrill ride, this Beowulf delivers. (There’s my quote for the newspaper ads.) But it also confirms that book reviewer’s pithy put-down. Watching Winstone’s Beowulf in a naked fight-to-the-death with Grendel — which rivals the steam-bath climax of Cronenberg’s Eastern Promises for sheer bone-crunching brutality — you’ve got to agree: this is brainless macho trash par excellence.

Beowulf opens Nov. 16 across Canada.

Martin Morrow writes about the arts for CBCNews.ca.

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