Beowulf review

This review contains no real spoilers. It does reveal a very tiny bit of the flick's content, however, so if you're one of the people who wants to know absolutely nothing about a movie beforehand, you might want to skip this. At least if you're planning on seeing this movie, that is. Most people should be able to read this regardless of whether or not they're intending to go watch.

Now, any proper movie review worth its salt should comment on how loyal the movie was to the source it was adapted from. However, everything that I know of the myth of Beowulf, I learned from a first-season episode of Star Trek: Voyager. (It was a bad episode. But then, I already said that it was a first-season episode of Star Trek: Voyager. So I'm repeating myself.) So it might be better if I skipped that part.

It was an epic movie. It was a very, very, very epic movie. nitessine said that it was the manliest movie of the century, even surpassing 300 in that regard. I disagree with him - I think Beowulf was a bit too epic for that. When a character can swim for five days straight and still be "conserving his strength", or fight underwater with no hint of him needing to breathe, it's so epic that it kinda eats at the suspension of disbelief. Don't get me wrong, I don't call that a bad thing - movies based on ancient epic myths are supposed to be, well, epic. It was just so epic that it failed at producing complete immersion, and I didn't get a chance to feel that I, personally, was soaking in the testosterone.

The computer animation was kinda weird. It was sorta in the uncanny valley territory, simultaneously both humanlike and non-humanlike enough to be distracting. However, it only distracted me for the first half an hour or so - after that, I got used to it and forgot that I was watching an animation.

Extreme feminists probably won't like this movie. It was as sexist as you'd expect from a tale told from the point of view of male viking warriors. Also, one scene with Grendel and his mother made me think of tentacle porn, which was a bit distracting. I got over it, however. (Nobody else admitted being reminded of tentacle porn while watching the scene. Filthy liars.)

It was a neat enough movie, and gave me the inspiration to write something quite cool (not referring to this post), so that's a definite plus. At least, I think it gave me the inspiration to write something quite cool - I'll see when I have written it. I still wanted to write this entry first, since I was also inspired to, well, write this entry. Worth the eight euros I paid for seeing it.

PS. Beowulf was pretty darn high level. CON and STR were somewhere up there, though his WIS seemed to have a negative modifier. Lots of ranks in Tumble and Climb. Swim, too.

This work is copyright Kaj Sotala and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.