Filmography for Beowulf (2007)
Prepared by Jennifer McGIvney 

Directed by: Robert Zemeckis

Screenplay by: Neil Gaiman, Roger Avary

DVD: Paramount, 2008
IMDB: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0442933/

Cast:

Note from Dr. K: Script is downloadable as a .pdf file from Drew's Script-o-Rama
using this link.

REVIEWS:

'Beowulf': Shrek meets 300 (Toronto Star: http://www.thestar.com/entertainment/Movies/article/276961)

The message of this Beowulf? Mind your monsters and dragons, lads, but be very, very afraid of women. They play for keeps.

'Beowulf' is Back, Beefed Up, in 3D (SF Chronicle: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2007/11/16/DDIITCC2D.DTL&type=movies) To do "Beowulf" again, there should be some reason to do "Beowulf" at all. In 2005, for example, "Beowulf & Grendel" revisited the tale in order to present Grendel as a nice guy with his own point of view. That was a very bad reason to revisit "Beowulf," but at least it was a reason. … This is the one good idea of Neil Gaiman and Roger Avary's screenplay, the notion that the heroes are conscious of their own publicity. The notion isn't explored or expanded enough to appreciably enhance the movie, but it does provide the hint of a modern sensibility, the beginning of a reason to re-examine the tale.

Confronting the Fabled Monster, Not to Mention His Naked Mom (NY Times: http://movies.nytimes.com/2007/11/16/movies/16beow.html?scp=1&sq=beowulf&st=nyt ) Stripped of much of the original poem’s language, its cadences, deep history and context, this film version of “Beowulf” doesn’t offer much beyond 3-D oohs and ahs…

SUGGESTED READINGS:

'Beowulf' Movie Magic Can't Conjure The Poem's Bare-Bones Enchantment (WashPost: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/11/21/AR2007112102353.html )

Weirdly, the film is most faithful to the poem when it fails most as a movie, at least by normal Hollywood standards. When the script veers from topic to topic, character to character, event to event, digression to digression, it apes the poem's methods, following the course of a relentless fate without trying to understand it.

The Technology That Makes 'Beowulf' Impressive Also Saps It of Emotion (WashPost:  http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/11/15/AR2007111502465.html) When the original was assembled (written? collected? sung? chanted?) around the embers back in the good ol' 700s or so, no theory of psychology existed, so there was no storytellers' need to conjure coherent behavior patterns or fully realized plots. Man was so powerless and all nature seemed arbitrary, so stories could be arbitrary, none more so than the epic poem of the Anglo-Saxon peoples (even if it told of Scandinavian adventures): The great warrior Beowulf fights and kills first Grendel, then Grendel's ma; 50 years later he fights a dragon. Unacceptably episodic today. No arc. No growth. Where's the reveal? What's the back story?

SUGGESTED QUESTIONS:

• In Dreaming of the Middle Ages, Eco contrasts historical novels (“fictional characters help one to understand the past [and the past is not taken as pretext]”) with cloak-and-dagger novels (“the past [taken as pretext] helps one to enjoy the fictional characters”). Using these definitions, which kind of story is this adaptation of Beowulf?
   
• In the Washington Post article, ‘Beowulf’ Movie Magic Can’t Conjure the Poem’s Bare-Bones Enchantment, it is argued that the story of Beowulf does not lend itself to a high-tech, CGI experience (“What the movie cheats its viewers on is the spirit of the original work. There can't be many literary masterpieces as non-3-D, as un-enhanced, as de-Dolbyed as "Beowulf."). In what ways do you agree and disagree with this view? How did that these effects contribute to the effectiveness of the work and how did they distract from it?
   
• How does the portrayal of Grendel’s mother compare with the description of her in the poem or the image you envisioned as you read the poem? What are potential reasons behind the filmmakers’ decision to portray her in this way?