The Ottery
“If an otter can’t have fun doing something, it just simply won’t do it.”

“I am here to kill your monstah”: The New Beowulf Movie

July 28th, 2007

When I first heard that Robert Zemeckis was directing a film version of Beowulf, I had visions of Grendel offering our Geatish hero a box of chocolates, followed by a conciliatory hug. When I learned that the film was going to be in 3-D motion capture (like Zemeckis’s freaky-looking The Polar Express), that didn’t help matters. And the casting announcement that Angelina Jolie would be playing Grendel’s mother? Please. I know she’s now adoptive mother to half the world, but she’s hardly monster-mama material.

And then I heard that Neil Gaiman would be working on the script. Neil Gaiman, who once said, “the big problem with authors is you can’t train most of them. We don’t train very easily because we’re like otters. You know, a dolphin you can train. You can say, ‘Do this, and you’ll get a fish.’ With an otter, if it does something cool and you give it a fish, next time it will try and do something cooler.”

With Neil Gaiman on board, I became intrigued. I checked out the just-released trailer (coinciding with 20 minutes of the film being screened at Comic Con), and it seems motion-capture has come a long way since The Polar Express. It also looks like it veers away from the original story a bit, which could be interesting. In the trailer, Grendel’s mama is being all seductive, which doesn’t seem like it would occur after he’s killed her son (which is when the battle between Beowulf and Grendel’s mother takes place in the literary work). Is there some sort of Morgan-le-Fay/Arthur thing going on, in which Grendel is actually Beowulf’s son? Or maybe this conversation does occur after Grendel’s death, and seduction is just Step 1 in Grendel’s mother’s plan for killing Beowulf.

Well. I guess I’ll have to see it to find out.

Also, you have to visit the official movie web site just to hear Beowulf say, “I am here to kill your monstah.” It had me rolling on the floor. Not quite the intended effect, I think, but oh well.

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