I recently emerged from the latest HMV sale with the DVD of the Robert Zemeckis / Neil Gaiman Beowulf movie. The most entertaining thing about the whole process (including the hour and a half spent watching the movie) was that they'd chosen to display Beowulf next to an edition of Sexy Beast. Side by side, the two DVDs look like this:



It's like a before / after shot, in this case before CGI and after CGI. However, Ray Winstone looking unaccountably ripped while still sounding like a dodgy used car salesman is far from the most ludicrous thing about this movie. I suppose one can argue it has earned a place in some dusty niche corner of film-making history for its supposedly innovative motion-capture technique thingy. Maybe it was different when it first came out at the cinema but I have to say, although it's vaguely interesting to see an entirely CGI movie, it doesn't look all that great to me. Everything has a weird plasticky quality and though I'd probably be impressed if it was a cut-scene in a computer game, for a movie whose only claim to fame is an aesthetic one it's a bit inexcusable.

And it doesn't really mitigate the fact that the whole movie is made of stupid. It's not so much that the changes they make to the story as a whole don't work (although, actually, when you get right down it they don't - it's just I don't want to say that directly in case I come across as some rabid Beowulf snob), it's that they can't seem to decide what they want to be saying. Beowulf, of course, being a partially burned 8th century manuscript written in a form of English no longer in common usage about a lifestyle, psychology and social structure completely disconnected from the way we live now, is not exactly the most accessible of documents. Therefore a certain amount of modernisation / reinterpretation was absolutely necessary for the sake of making the story even slightly interesting to an audience comprised of something other than Anglo-Saxon geeks and JRR Tolkein, who I suspect don't get out to the cinema very often (the latter on account of being dead).

But what whoever was ultimately responsible for undertaking that process (was it you, Mr Gaiman? Own up!) seems to have done is sex it up to the nth degree (because that makes it relevant to the modern world, right?) and then attempt to bung every conceivable interpretation of the text into one movie. Needless to say, this isn't an effective strategy. Now it's been a while (make that, ahem, a good seven years, ahem) since I've had a flick through the original but from what I remember (and with all due apologies to people who have spent their lives studying this shit) the main controversies surrounding the text can essentially be boiled down to the following:

1) is this a heroic or anti-heroic story
2) is it set within a Christian or pagan worldview
3) is it from an oral or written tradition

Of course it's infinitely more nuanced and complex than that but I believe if you were to interrogate the film about these questions, the conversation would go something like this:

Film: Yeah!
You: I beg your pardon. Which?
Film: All of them, man, all of them!
You: But that doesn't make any sense.
Film: Look! Angelina Jolie's breasts!

The Beowulf poem is long and a bit incoherent: there are three big fights, one of which is obligingly repeated for anyone who wasn't paying attention the first time, and three funerals (and, for that matter, a lot of numeric correspondences). But basically it can be summarised thus: Beowulf, hero of the Geats (that's the Swedish to you and me), comes to the aid of Hrothgar, the King of Danes, whose great hall, Heorot (from the Anglo-Saxon word for heart, d'you see, there's like a metaphor going on there) is being trashed by a monster called Grendel, also eats people, bursts their bones and drinks their blood. Beowulf, trusting his fate to God or, err, fate, fights Grendel with his bare hands (there's a funky arm ripping off scene) and he limps off to die in the misty deadlands from whence he came. This unsurprisingly happens to piss off Grendel's mother who then descends on Heorot to do some trashing of her own. Beowulf, armed with a magic sword called Hrunting (looks impressive, is no use to man or beast), tracks her to her underground lair and proceeds to get totally whipped. As he's about to snuff it, he commends his soul to God / abandons himself to fate and then luckily happens to put his hand on a magic sword. The only magic sword than can kill Grendel's mum. That she happens to have lying around in her own lair. Anyway. So he kills her with it. Beowulf is then celebrated by the Danes for a bit before trotting off back to Geatland to be King of it. As the end of his life approaches, his realm is being terrorised by a dragon whose hoard they'd made the quite elementary mistake of nicking. Beowulf does himself up all Kingly-like and goes to take the dragon down. He manages but only at the cost of his own life. They bury his corpse at sea. The end. There is no bonking in the poem. To be honest, there very are few women at all. Possibly Beowulf and Wiglaf are going at it.

As you can see from even this brief summary there a quite a few weird things going on here. For starters, it's hard to tell what we're meant to make of Beowulf. I mean, yes he's very strong and very heroic but whenever the text tells us about this strength and heroism, it's also quick to remind us that these will fade and his memory will eventually be forgotten because time erodes everything to nothing. Also, the poem quite explicitly places itself in the context of other heroic sagas (like the Volsunga Saga) in which the heroes manage to kill dragons without getting themselves crispy fried. In fact, dragon-slaying was generally considered to be the mark of a true hero - something at which Beowulf noticeably fails to achieve. Furthermore, there's a very peculiar scene in which one of Hrothgar's warriors / orators / some other random position in court impossible to accurately render called (H)unferth challenges Beowulf verbally for having lost a swimming competition. Possibly this is just a lacklustre attempt to depict flyting but Beowulf answers basically like this: "That is so totally not true, dude. I like not only won the swimming contest but I killed like eighty million sea monsters on the way. And, by the way, everybody says you killed your brothers. So there." Obviously Anglo Saxon boasting is not the same as modern day bragging but personally I find the eighty million sea monsters (all right, all right, he actually says nine) a bit hard to swallow. And accusing someone of murdering kinsmen was massively massively rude, to say the least. The point is you could plausibly go either way on the Beowulf hero/anti-hero deal. And, given the dating of the manuscript, Beowulf was basically an anachronism at the time of scribing anyway - so it's hard to tell whether he's harking back to a glorious, disappearing tradition or revealing the unsuitability of warrior-codes in what was, then, the "modern" world.

Thus, the character of Beowulf, as hilariously depicted by Ray Winston in the movie, is both a braggart, a deeply flawed man who destroys himself and his kingdom, a lustful moron and, when you get to the crunch, a hero. The problem is that it doesn't capture the idea that men are capable of being heroes despite their flaws (and this is a completely modern sentiment, no way present in the original poem), it just presents a Beowulf who pretty much suffers from MPD. His moments of abject stupidity detract from his moments of heroism and his moments of heroism are completely compromised by the fact he consistently fucks everything up and then lies about it. In the movie, we learn the real reason that Beowulf doesn't win the swimming contest is because he has been distracted by mermaid-bonking on the ocean floor and has made up the story about sea monsters so he doesn't have to admit it. Similarly, instead of fighting Grendel's mother, Beowulf makes a deal with her. A bonking deal. However, his final battle with the dragon (even though it's all his own damn fault) is portrayed as a heroic struggle instead of the massive failure it really is and when dies he does so in full knowledge of his own flaws and frailty, having sacrificed himself to atone for them. The textual Beowulf's last request is to have a gander at the dragon's hoard - which strikes me as avaricious rather than noble.

As the summary of the MSS also indicates, there's a higgledy-piggeldy mixture of the Christian and the pagan in there, and it's hard to tell whether the traditions are at war with each other within the poem, meant to sit comfortably side by side or whether the Christian stuff has been added later by a silly monk who hasn't made a very good job of it. For example, the poem makes a really unconvincing attempt to place Grendel's monstrousness within a Christian context by claiming he is descended from Cain and thus abandoned by, and at war with God. The poem is studded with references to the Christian God, most of which seem to flow naturally with the rest of the narrative (for example Beowulf's great strength is often called a gift from God), but every now and then again they'll be a word or a phrase that seems to imply that many of these references were in fact stuffed in there. I mean, there's an honest to goodness mention of Frea (Freyr) as the Geats embark across the ocean and at one point there's talk of heaven's helmet (heofena helm). Now I know there's probably a metaphorical dimension going on but the Christian God has never been renowned for his helmet wearing. Furthermore although the characters will often call upon God's name in prayer or praise, for the most part they're surrendering themselves to his will in much the same miserably fatalistic way characters in Anglo Saxon poetry tend to abandon themselves to the vagaries of cruel fate. Obviously this is in-keeping with the ideas of culture moving from a pagan to a Christian tradition but in the actual poem it often comes across as if someone has done the 8th century equivalent of tippexing out "wryd" and replacing it with "God." Except where they've forgotten of course and just left the "wryd" business in, or concepts applicable to it such as the idea of "metodsceafte" (fate's decree i.e. that you die when it says so and ya boo sucks to you for caring).

The film actually does quite an interesting job of dealing with this. It's one of the insistences in which it actually makes a decision about the poem. It seems to have decided that the poem, instead of being an unhappy attempt by an incompetent monk to turn something pagan into something Christian, actually straddles both worlds - and it shows this by depicting the rise and spread of Christian thought over the course of the film. When Grendel first starts attacked the hall, Hrothgar observes that he's made sacrifices to all their Gods and (H)unferth (you haven't forgotten him, right? Untranslatable advisor/warrior guy, in the movie played/voiced by John Malkovitch, yay!) suggests perhaps they could try this Jesus Christ fellow who's getting big at the moment. Later on, (H)unferth does, indeed, convert to Christianity, which is funky. However, what doesn't work is that they've taken the Danes rather literally as Danes. Which means they're Vikings, right!

Wrong. They're Anglo-Saxons! And having them be Vikings undermines the whole thematic resonance of the story. Now, truthfully I don't know all that much about Viking religious beliefs but from the movies I have seen and The Saga of Eric of the Viking it seems they're quite an exuberant people with a very strong warrior-hero culture. Consequently they have warrior gods and, for people who die in appropriately heroic ways as they were, in fact, expected to do, the afterlife was one big joyous piss up. So dying, although it curtailed the amount of rape and pillage you could get in, was presumably no big deal - and a warrior's ascent to Valhalla was actually something worth celebrating.

The Anglo Saxons, by contrast, were a thoroughly miserable lot. Life was short, fate was cruel and arbitrary, and nothing you did mattered because everybody and everything dies and turns to dust. This fatalistic despair is central to the Anglo Saxon worldview - and thus to Beowulf. Right at the beginning of the poem, the poet is quick to mention that Beowulf's actions over the course of the poem (saving Heorot) are pointless because family feuding causes the whole place to burn down a few generations later. And the poem constantly reminds us of the futility of human endeavour. Situating the action against Viking values and Viking religion takes away the bitter edge of the poem: for a Viking, Beowulf's death in battle is a triumphant and heroic one, for the Geatish people it's the first step on the path to their destruction. In the poem, Beowulf's funeral is accompanied by some random Geatish woman singing about how awful it's going to be when they inevitably get invaded, raped and enslaved now that their childless King has been chargrilled by a dragon.

The movie also seems at pains to make the story cohere and, to some extent, this works. Keeping the action focused on Heorot, for example, instead of ganking us all the way back to Geatland. However, it also means that the movie strives to offer explanations for the monster: Grendel is actually the son of Hrothgar by Angelina Jolie and the dragon is Beowulf's own hellspawn. Thus the monsters - except for Angelina, of course, she is just generically demonic - all have origins and blame can be appropriately apportioned to those who just can't keep it in their battle armour. But this fixation with origins and accountability is, again, very modern and, again, I would argue it detracts from the story more than it renders it accessible for a 21st century audience. A story about two men who bring destruction upon themselves and their people due to Thinking With Their Cocks presents a very different world to one in which monsters roam the dark places as a matter of course. Essentially what the movie-Beowulf says is "people will do idiotic things but they are still capable of being heroes when it really matters" and what poem-Beowulf says is "shit just happens and then you die."

Additionally, the main villain of the movie is, of course, golden naked Angelina Jolie. Monstrous woman yadda yadda stereotype yadda yadda yawn. And Grendel is kind of pitiful, lurching zombie creature. Although he does speak in Old English which is fucking amazing, actually. Kudos for that. In the poem, Grendel is a much more interesting creation, specifically because, although he is an outcast (this is another popular Anglo Saxon theme, along with Why Does My Topic Bar Never Have Any Hazelnuts In It and Why Does It Always Rain On Me), the reality of his otherness is always questionable. Yes, he is monstrous and bestial but he is also recognisably like a man. He thinks, he feels, he laments, he has a mother who cares about him enough to seek vengeance on his behalf and he dies, alone and afraid in the dark. If you want to get all Freudy about it, Grendel is Beowulf's, and mankind's, dark reflection. By placing the weight of villainy on the quite frankly dashed attractive bosom shoulders of Angelina Jolie you merely replace all this with a dodgy Eve parable.

With this, as with everything else, the movie tries to have its mead and drink it: it makes a few throwaway references to Beowulf being no less monstrous than the monsters he fights but doesn't really confront the idea properly and seems to change its mind once the dragon starts tearing shit up. And I suppose the dragon is quite literally born of Beowulf but it's a completely different kind of symbol to the one Grendel represents.

As well as this (what, says the exhausted reader, there's more?!), the film seems to have taken some oddly literal readings of the text that are distracting more than anything. Specifically it depicts Heorot has a place of drunken revelry and unrestrained hedonism. I'm sure they're trying to make some kind of point about, well, something but Grendel's incursion into Heorot is all the more shocking in the text because the hall represents a safe space of civilisation, security and sociability. If Heorot is basically a cesspit of pissheads, the invasion of a barbarous, carnivorous monster doesn't quite have the same impact. I seem to recall the poem make quite a few references to "druncen" thanes but druncen had a much broader meaning than its modern analogue. Drunken has a pejorative edge that "druncen" does not convey: druncen thanes are happy, snuggling, sociable thanes.

Similarly - and I seriously have no idea what was going through the film-makers heads at this point - in the text Beowulf sheds his battlegear (his hildegeatwe) in order to take Grendel on mano-a-mano, as God intended, whereas in the movie, this disrobing is taken absolutely literally to mean that Beowulf fights Grendel absolutely starkers. Not only is this an unfathomable military decision, it renders the whole fight utterly ludicrous as the film-makers have to come up with increasingly ingenious ways to conceal our hero's CGI penis. What is this: the Peter "What's a Metaphor?" Jackson School of Film Making?

In summary, then, Beowulf-The-Poem is a bewildering text because it was written a long time ago in a different language and emerged from a culture about which we have very little information and into which we have very little insight.

Beowulf-The-Film, by contrast, is bewildering because it is stupid.