Hwæt! We Gardena in geardagum...

Last night I drove up to Sacramento and joined Phil and Joe for dinner and then we saw Beowulf in IMAX 3-D. Now, when I first encountered the movie trailers I really had no desire to see the movie. The trailers gave the impression that the movie would have little to do with the source material, the computer graphics didn't really draw me in and Angelina Jolie was involved.


Angelina Jolie...So.Not.Attractive.

Anyway, the geek reviews came in last week extolling the movie and it peaked my curiosity so I setup the get together.

Now, having studied the original poem I find it fascinating. The story itself, from our modern vantage point, it not particularly engaging and seems typical. But this is because Beowulf is the archetype for much of our modern fiction, especially in the fantasy genre. J.R.R. Tolkien's academic career revolved around the poem and it's translation. He would recite the poem in Old English to his Oxford pupils.

Something that I find so interesting is how much English has changed over the years. Here is a section of the poem in it's original form:

þe hie ær drugon aldorlease
lange hwile. Him þæs liffrea,
wuldres wealdend, woroldare forgeaf;
Beowulf wæs breme (blæd wide sprang),
Scyldes eafera Scedelandum in.

Make any sense to you? (It is barely more than gibberish to me. It might as well be Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky.) Isn't it amazing how different our language was in the 7th century!

If you are interested in a synopsis of the story you can find it at Wikipedia here. (Note the plot line similarities to Smaug in Tolkien's Hobbit.)

Anyway, the movie was impressive. The writers changed the plot line quite a bit and turned it into a morality play, but I found that the feel of the original story seemed to remain intact. The visuals are really impressive, especially so in 3-D. Computer overlays have come along way and since the director can get any camera angle and tell the story in exactly the way that they want I think the technology will be used in the future. The visuals drew me in enough that I rarely found myself thinking outside the story. A point that Joe made afterwards was that because everything is CGI when a monster arrives in the story you don't tend to think "Wow, great CGI" you simply see it as part of the story.

The morality tale was told well enough to be intriguing and minimally thought provoking. All-in-all it is an interesting movie, though very violent. It is not a great movie, but worth seeing in 3-D.