I Am Beowulf!

Well, not me exactly...but....

Okay, I just finished up watching the Director's Cut of Beowulf. Excellent movie (though not for the squeamish--plenty of blood Lord of the Rings and 300 style).

Robert Zemeckis, the creative genius behind such films as the Back to the Future trilogy, Who Framed Roger Rabbit and Cast Away, here uses his charming (but flawed and creepy) The Polar Express as a technical springboard to re-imagine the epic myth of Beowulf for a 21st century audience. The reason filmmakers return to the well of animation time and again is simple: with animation, you are restrained only by your own imagination.

Like the poem, the film can be divided into roughly three acts. In the first, the monster Grendel (Crispin Glover) is roused from his cave by the merriment of the drunken lout, King Hrothgar (Anthony Hopkins) and his reveling Danes. Grendel attacks the mead hall, slaughtering and devouring his victims. Hrothgar sends out a medieval distress call to which the warrior Beowulf (Ray Winstone) and his band of men respond. After a cataclysmic confrontation with the beast (and the funniest stuff in CGI history), Beowulf tears Grendel's arm from his torso, leaving the troll to limp back to his cave to die.

In the second act, Grendel's mother (Angelina Jolie) seeks vengeance and goes on a devastating bloodletting, butchering all of Beowulf's men. This leads to a confrontation in the monster's cave from which Beowulf returns with yet another tale of struggle and gallant victory. But is our hero telling the whole truth?

In the final act, we jump decades into the future, after Beowulf has become king and taken Hrothgar's young queen, Wealthow (Robin Wright Penn), as his wife. Beowulf presides over a sprawling kingdom that has fallen into lethargy and territorial squabbles. But such issues are forgotten when a massive dragon appears in the skies and sets itself on destroying Beowulf and all he holds dear.

At the very heart of this new Beowulf is the theme of sin and consequence. The film reveals that the temptations we give into, however small, harmless or pleasurable they may seem, often return when we least expect them, rabid and famished for blood. In Beowulf, one character's sin, which appears as little more than a miniscule indiscretion, quite literally grows into a destructive force beyond human comprehension. The sins of the father are not just visited on the son, but on all those unlucky enough to be near the transgressor. "We men are the monsters now," Beowulf tells his best friend and comrade in arms, Wiglaf (Brendan Gleeson).

Beowulf is every bit as interested in Faustian bargains as the temptations that set those bargains in motion. Grendel's (tastefully) naked mother, oozing sex and seduction, and whispering flattering praise, is temptation personified. But the image she chooses to take is not her real form. It is only a masquerade with which to ensnare her prey—her true form is a reptilian monstrosity little different than her misshapen son and every bit as deadly. Like those things that tempt us to stray from the righteous path, her physical sensuality is a mask for her lethality.

Beowulf pushes the limits of its PG-13 rating. If the film had been live action instead of animated, it would certainly garner a hard R-rating. The violence is almost constant from the beginning. Grendel rips and tears bodies apart and chews them up with relish. Though the film never indulges in any explicit sexual situations, it does inject plenty of innuendo. The film gives equal opportunity to both male and female nudity. Early on, Beowulf battles Grendel in the nude, a primal, animalistic fight that, thanks to a few well placed props, hides Beowulf's more vulnerable parts. Of course, this almost makes you look for it, mainly because you want to see what they've used to cover it up. It's an entertaining scene to watch.

Later, when Beowulf confronts Grendel's mother, she rises from the water of the cave, all shapes and curves and long, unbroken lines. Covered in a thin veneer of gold lacquer, the siren's nudity is like that of a mannequin, curvaceous but anatomically indistinct.

I saw Beowulf twice in theaters where it was shown 3-d, and I enjoyed it. After watching 3-d, it's almost a let-down to see it in 2-d. But it's still a fantastic tale. I don't suggest it for kids under 16, though, because of the violence. It's a bit in the 300 relm, what with decapitations and blood gushing.