Beowulf & Grendel

Rating: R

Movie Release Date: September 5, 2005 (Canada) / January 6, 2006 (USA)

DVD Release Date: September 26, 2006

Plot 411: A clan of Danes are terrorized by a troll who kills their people.

Review: I've read this poem throughout my school years several times and never did I remember it as portrayed in this movie. That's not to say the movie is terrible though, and I'm not really a stickler for a word-for-word translation. For those who are, you might find the film to be ruining a masterpiece. I enjoyed it for what it was, liberal poetic license and all. The landscape of Iceland, where this movie was shot, is magnificent. It's all open spaces, green mountains, stark cliffs and black sand beaches. There is also an obvious moral to the story that the director intends audiences to learn by the end of the film, which is that when people judge others before they fully understand them we all suffer. Grendel is depicted as a beautifully forlorn creature, intelligent and more human, in fact, than the rest of the characters. The audience really empathizes with him by the end of the film. Mostly, I watched this film for Gerard Butler, but somehow he didn't really come through for me in this film. His character, Beowulf, is such a tragic hero.

Watch It: For a liberal interpretation of an old classic.

Skip It: If you find accents difficult to understand as there's no subtitles to read. Even though the accents were only British, Irish and the like, some parts were hard to understand. They used slang that my American ears had trouble following at times.

Trailer: