Please don’t make love to it.
I read Beowulf once, but I don’t really recall it, so the fidelity of Beowulf and Grendel (2005) to the original is quite beyond me, and perhaps that is just as well, as I thought Beowulf fairly boring.
This version, too, felt more like a wave and a tap on the head to a story, as segues are nearly non-existent, as is explanation or much character development. We might say that Beowulf and his men have been called in as an exterminator of the troll known as Grendel. The troll, motivated by the murder of his father years before, is focused on vengeance upon those who ran his father off a cliff. In fact, he’s so motivated that he won’t battle with Beowulf and his men until they engage in their own bit of mischief, desecrating the remains of the troll’s father.
Along the way we have an outcast witch, a great deal of rough swearing, something swimming around in the harbor, long soulful looks from Beowulf, and some beautiful shots of the wild lands of the Danes. But a sense of urgency never descends on the audience, even in the midst of a veritable slaughter of villagers. At best, it never quite reaches the point where we turned it off, but rather we watched just to see where it might go next.
That didn’t turn out to be all that interesting.
