Ray Winstone in Beowulf Movie

True confessions time: I didn’t expect to like this movie. Video games and gratuitous bloodshed bore me to tears, and the trailers and the buzz led me to expect quite a lot of both. However, the storytelling and acting (yes, acting) are good enough to carry the movie most of the time, special effects or no special effects.

There’s plenty here to appeal to a Heathen audience: most of the action takes place in an intact Heathen culture, where Christianity is a newfangled curiosity. The movie opens with a classic mead hall scene, in all its gritty grubby glory, and after Grendel’s attack Beowulf arrives to claim the role of hero in a round of boasting. We are in a Germanic world without all of the preachy Christian interpolations of the poem.

The faces and emotions of most of the main characters were believable — with the exception of poor Wealhtheow, who was rendered as a geometric mass like an artist’s dummy. Beowulf could have been done as a simple smash and bash piece (monsters! wenches!), but after the first round of action, a more complex human story takes over. Unfortunately, the story is trite, but that is not the fault of the actors or the technology. A number of complex facial expressions and unspoken moments come off successfully, showing that this is indeed drama and not a video game or graphic novel. Visually, there’s a lot to enjoy: I loved the details of the ornaments and clothing, and the battle with the dragon was glorious. It’s too bad the producers haven’t yet learned to render galloping horses, which looked like a row of bouncing tennis balls, but that was really the one jarring exception.

Ever since John Gardner’s book Grendel, modern Beowulf interpreters have been interested in the monsters’ motivations and point of view, and this movie is no exception. In the interest of exploring monster-human relations, the writers decided to use Grendel’s mother as a femme fatale. (By this point everyone knows she is played by a digital version of Angelina Jolie, so I’m not giving anything away here.) This device seemed trite and gave the plot a soap opera twist, but the rest of the story and the acting were interesting and believable. This is not the Beowulf of the poem — but for an audience willing to experience it on its own terms, it has quite a tale to tell.

Note: if you want to brush up on the original Beowulf, check out the dual-language edition by Howell Chickering. The Chickering translation is more accurate than Seamus Heaney’s, and preserves more of the sense and rhythm of Anglo-Saxon verse. If you want to hear the poem in Old English, check out the Beowulf excerpt at Anglo-Saxon Aloud, or  Benjamin Bagby’s performance on DVD.