Tonight I was clubbed by Beowulf and Grendel. A latecomer into the Epic Movie Craze that’s been galloping throughout the film world for the past ten years, this film manages to turn an archaic Norse poem into a dull, disjointed, dialect-challenged drip of a movie.

If you’re feeling left out and confused, this movie is based on an anoymous poem called Beowulf, originating from Denmark (or somewhere up there), and dating back to the very dawn of this millenium. Set in 500 AD, the film attempts to take a centuries-old tale told in rhyming verse and make it applicable to theatre tramps.

As expected in any well-done Epic Movie, the battle scenes are appropriately tense and violent, and the decapitations and dismemberments are frequent and cringe-worthy. You can cheer for the shaggy-but-clean-cut hero (He’s got the perfect Epic Look: Colin Farrel mixed with Aragorn from Lord of the Rings), and you can sympthasize with the multi-dimensional villain.

Grendel (the monster, the beast, the troll) is a giant-sized, humane monster that kills strictly for vengeance and food. He speaks in touching troll-ish roaring gobbledygook (which the local witch - the one with toussled, Loreal-quality red-dyed hair and the bland American accent — can apparently translate) and stomps around the countryside with admirable vigour. His growls, grunts are howls are moving and exciting, and provide a great foil for the strutting hero, Beowulf.

I should note that I had a very minor personal interest in this movie before I began watching it. The cinematographer (Jan Kiesser) had visited our filmmaking class at TWU two years ago to tell us about his work on this project, and had shown us watermarked clips from production, two years before the film hit the theatres. It was cool, to say the least, because who gets visited by famous cinematographers? So naturally, I was excited to see the finished product.

I was impressed, I guess, but only because I wanted to cheer for the guy. His shots are well-composed and artful, the product of a professional. It’s the work of somebody who knows how to work, but it’s not the work of a genius. Given that this film was shot in some of the most gorgeous scenery known to Earth (the rugged, blistering, icy coastlines of Iceland), it’s already infused with natural beauty — but the filmwork does not stun, astound, impress or inspire in the way that it could. It doesn’t live up to its potential as a mind-blowing work of art.

What’s worse than the perfectly average cinematography is the perfectly imperfect dialogue. Each character seems to have been instructed to select their own accents from grab bag of Choose Your Own European Lilt, picking from a limited pallete of Irish-sounding, Scottish-sounding and English-sounding. The worst is the wildcard witch/whore character, who, alone in the rocky crags, speaks with a passionless neutro-American accent. I think a better solution would have been to train each actor to master the archaic, muddled, Danes-in-the-Dark Age Olde English that was spoken in the era, and give the movie Passion-of-the-Mel subtitles. It would at least help us understand what on earth is being said.

Additionally, it was depressingly clear that adapting an ancient poem into a screenplay is not a fun or fluid process. Bless the filmmaker’s little hearts for not using a voice-over narration, but as the movie progresses it becomes clear that telling a poem without a narrator is a major challenge. In order to re-create the poetic storytelling flavour, they chose to present the story as a series of hard-to-follow flashbacks, rather than the more-desirable chronological option. The result is a choppy, interruption-filled film that requires a lot of room for people to ask “What did he say?” and “Who is that again?”

I can only think of only one reason why anybody would want to watch this movie: to see what it’s like when an ancient poem is adapted into a modern movie, especially if you studied the poem in your Literature 12 class. If that doesn’t apply to you, there are better contendors in the Epic Movie Genre for you to spend your time watching.

A summary: