Mighty Beowulf March 24, 2008
Posted by ghostof82 in : Film General , trackbackWell I’m shocked. I hesitate to introduce the film as a cgi spectacle as it’s really much more than that- thanks to the excellent screenplay by Neil Gaiman and Roger Avary it’s a great historic adventure and a very dark essay on heroism, myth and the very human desire for immortality, if only in song. All I expected was the usual cgi-demo visuals and little else, which is why I held back from seeing it at the cinema and waited for the blu-ray. Oh well, my 32-inch lcd may not have the size of a cinema screen but the blu-ray certainly has a flawless HD picture (is it just me though who thinks the DVD and Blu-ray box art is just terrible?).
Beowulf is a tale of the Old World- a world before Christianity championed the weak and the powerless, a pagan world of heroes and mighty deeds, where might was right and supernatural forces plagued the world. Life is full of darkness, hard and bitter, mortality bearing down on the petty lives of men.
Beowulf strides through this world like an insolent Titan, brash, confident, hell-bent on being a hero such as tales are told of for centuries, as were Alexander and Achilles before him. There is certainly something of Baron Munchausen about him, as he recounts his tales of heroism with more than a dash of exuberance and poetic license.
But Beowulf is only a man, as flawed as any of us, and his downfall is a she-demon that takes the form of an impossibly-beautiful seductress that, in return for him fathering her a son, promises Beowulf the power and immortality that he dreams of. And getting everything he dreams of is of course a curse that taints him and all those that he knows and loves, and denies him the son that would give him the only true measure of immortality that any of us can ever really attain. Like Neil Gaiman’s own Sandman, this is a deeply melancholic tale.
And history, of course, repeats itself endlessly. Beowulf is cursed just as King Hrothgar was before him, and, at films end, it seems the same fate awaits Beowulf’s successor. Indeed, there seems a subtext of Angelina Jolie’s demoness representing the sexual temptations of woman as the downfall of men. Is that straying into the homo-erotic territory of 300? I don’t know, but either way, this is a far more complex and rewarding film than I had expected.
Regards the cgi animation, there is good and bad- most of the main cast, particularly Beowulf and the Demoness that seduces him, are frankly astonishing, but some of the lesser cast slip into Shrek territory. The definitive cgi film still lies some years ahead of us, but like the Final Fantasy-The Spirits Within, this film is certainly a step towards it. As it is, it is a surprisingly rich tale… mighty Beowulf indeed.
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