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Big Screen BeowulfBy Rafe Telsch: 2005-01-21 00:00:00
After you create a film version of a Christmas Icon, what do you follow up with? For Robert Zemeckis, who creeped Cinema Blend staff out this year with an eerie CGI Tom Hanks in The Polar Express, you set your sites on one of the oldest known pieces of literature in existence.
Sony Pictures has dropped $2 million for a screen adaptation of “Beowulf” for Zemeckis to direct, if directing is what you call what he did for the creepy CGI motion capture performances he had in Polar Express. That’s right - Zemeckis’s take on “Beowulf” will be motion capture CGI, because following up Santa Claus with a Scandinavian Warrior instantly comes to mind for animated movies. The script is penned by Richard Avary and Neil Gaiman, and was originally intended for Avary to direct until the script was caught up in development hell and the rights were lost by DreamWorks. Since then Avary has held a tight fist on the script, until now. Gaiman’s name is no mystery to fans of fantasy, and he seems like the perfect person to write an adaptation of “Beowulf”. Variety credits Avary as being Quentin Tarantino’s former partner, who co-wrote Pulp Fiction, however wouldn’t that be Roger Avary? Like Steven Spielberg’s The War of the Worlds, there is a smaller budget version of “Beowulf” currently in post production (with Phantom Gerard Butler in the title role) that has a good chance of being more true to the source material, but will probably be overlooked. “Beowulf”, of course, is the tale of a Geat warrior who saves the Danish people from a monster named Grendel. Less familiar is the continuation of the story after that, as Beowulf takes on Grendel’s mother, and later in life, a dragon. Antonio Banderas’s The 13th Warrior was loosely based on the poem. No word as to whether a creepy CGI-Tom Hanks will appear as Beowulf, Grendel, Hrothgar, and Hrunting.
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November 24th, 2007 at 00:41
The movie was not true to the text. In spite of the lack of female characters in the main plot of the Anglo-Saxon epic, Zemeckis has created a succubus with great power, Grendel's mother. What for? Who knows? Such are the fantasies of men who read an epic about duty and honor and change that into lust and so called glory. Freud would have a hey-day about the great kings, such as Hrothgar, Beowulf, and finally, Wiglaf plunging into the ocean to submerge themselves into a mother-of-water, the destroyer of men. Those that were once considered great warriors are now reduced to weak-willed common men who pawn their souls for sex and murder the monstrous offspring they beget.