I saw this in the 3-D version ($9.50 for a Seniors ticket!) on Thanksgiving Day, and despite the high ticket price, it is awesome. The very best special effects combined with a movie I have ever seen (Disney had a Michael Jackson piece of fluff called 'Captain EO" long ago at Disney world that was perhaps more impressive for sheer special effects, but it had no plot). The story was somewhat altered. In the original, Beowulf, leader of the Geats (from S. Sweden) sails to Denmark and destroys Grendal, a butt-ugly scabby giant with poor dentalwork, who has been a party pooper at the local King Hrothgar's Mead Hall. Grendal has the bad habit of killing and occasionally chowing down on Hrothgar's warriors. Beowulf defeats him while butt naked (it is interesting how there is always something obstructing the B-man's genitals), ripping his arm off. Grendal goes back to mommy and dies. Mommy is played by Angelina Jolie. She is striking, naked, yet nippleless, and unlike in the original epic, Beowulf does not kill her. Instead, he inseminates her (off camera, I am afraid) and leaves Hrothgar's prized gold drinking horn with her.
There is a final, even more epic, castle-trashing fight at the end, in which Beowulf rips the heart out of a dragon (his son, actually), and later dies and is burned in his Viking dragonship.
The action is far more important than the plot, which as I said, is somewhat rewritten and is more coherent than in the original. The set design and the special effects should get Oscars, and the soundtrack, casting, costuming and visuals are spectacular. It held my attention despite of my being filled with Thanksgiving dinner (a low triptophan Taiwanese dinner, to be correct), and I have dozed off during Harry Potter and Arnold Schwartzenegger films in the past. Anthony Perkins plays the stocky Hrothgar, Ray Winstone plays Beowulf (and the dragon and the golden man, according to imdb). The whole thing is set around 517 AD in Denmark, which is properly snowy and chilly-looking. Christianity is mentioned several times, but rejected as a proper religion for monster slaying and dragonbashing Vikings.
Grendal is about as wretched a character as I have ever seen: uglier than Smeagol/Gollum and seventeen times bigger, and with a mostly incomprehensible screechy
voice. As close to a human cockroach as you will ever see. He was hairy and shaggy in the epic poem I think, but he is scabby with only a smattering of hair in this version.
Its plot may not be entirely true to the original, but its essence is unchanged. The best film I have seen in 2007 for sure.
