Take an ancient epic poem, and a director like Robert Zemeckis, two writers such as Robert Avary and Neil Gaiman, and a cast of actors including Anthony Hopkins, Angie Jolie and John Malkovich ... is almost impossible to think that they do not come out a good movie. Yet, by going to see Beowulf (2007) have easy way to make sure of the contrary. 
The story begins when Avary (former writer of Tarantino's Pulp Fiction) began writing a film treatment focuses on the poem, and Neil Gaiman, it should be noted that at least for the good fantasy novel American Gods, he is placed on the side. The two wanted a text that, deriving from the Saxon poem, the main elements, building of the nucleus of an epic low-cost, engaged in the myth (as indeed is American Gods, which tells of the theophany of the ancient gods in today's United States) , Avary is a good writer, Gaiman is a good writer, but translating the myth into a language of film is not for everybody, especially when it comes to Beowulf, an anonymous poem, composed of about three thousand verses written in Saxon, dating from between 650 and 850 of our era and discovered by accident in a code, which is already the base of the unfortunate Beowolf Graham Baker, and although in an informal, interesting The 13 warrior John Mc Tiernan - part of an unusual alliance between the Nordic warriors Arabic Fhaled Ibn Ahmed (Antonio Banderas) committed to fight against the "monstrous" man-bear cannibalism, similar to traditional Norse berserker.
The poem, in its essential lines, tells of a Danish king, Hrothgar, and his country devastated by a kind of ogre, Grendel, until a young Geat, a resident of southern Sweden, the young Beowulf , is to combat it, attacks him with his bare hands and cut off an arm. Grendel flees and ends up dying, but his mother comes forward. Beowulf confronts the realms swamp where she lives with a magic sword and killing, and then he returns to Sweden. Half a century later we find Beowulf the Geat king, forced to take up arms to fight similar threats in his homeland: a flying dragon who manages to defeat, was wounded to death.
Myth, and as we all know what our position against it, even when away thousands of years of life from the moment it is primarily a teaching, a mythos the Greek manner, and then something that tells us about the relationship between the our world and an "other" world, our interaction with it, the founding heroes of the culture and civilization and gods. And above all, is something "alive", which can be reactivated, but written in language appropriate.
Avary and Gaiman did not succeed in their intent and then Robert Zemeckis was aware of the project and made sure to develop it otherwise. Zemeckis is a rather daring investigator, and a magician of the modern fantasy genre, from the famous series of Back to the Future, the first "contamination" between cartoons and filming of Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (1988), by Death Becomes Her (1992) to the beautiful Contact (2000), until recently Polaris Express (2004) was a search for new ways of expression. So Gaiman and Avary reduced and transformed ways and times: Grendel is a kind of hideous troll, the son of illegal Hroðgar (Anthony Hopkins) and a mysterious aquatic creature (Angie Jolie) and Beowulf (Ray Winstone), is a swashbuckling hero and troublemaker, who faces the monster and kills him but then, seduced by the mother, establishes a sort of non-aggression pact and returns to the palace claiming to have killed her; Hroðgar appointed him his heir and then commits suicide. Years later, when Beowulf is an old king who defends his realm against the Frisians, a new monster (this time his son) appears and fights against his father, both die in the end, and the monster re-acquire the human form.
The implementation in the form of a screenplay is poor compared to the beauty of the original text, we do not return the mythical element, not only not required for the "Update" in the Freudian sense, but for a real linguistic anemia, which anemia eventually results in visual unnecessarily Avary and Gaiman Beowulf do tell the time of heroes is over with Christianity, and that at that time there remains only the ugliness and misery, did better Boorman and Pallenberg through Merlin, in famous Excalibur the same John Boorman. But that, as we know, was a myth "alive".
A reading that ends up becoming a baracconesco approach to myth, a parody of martial arts movies, in a setting that, although has some moments of great interest, most of the time seems out of the images a fantasy role-playing game. Some might argue that Hollywood is the reading that the expression of a people that has no myths are older than a couple of centuries ago, offers the myth itself, but it would be too simple an objection, since it is the same for years that Hollywood has turned to such as the epic westerns (or the gangster) in great cinema. Moreover, although Zemeckis is not John Ford or Howard Hawks, is also a film that follows, as we have said, a policy authoring. The problem today is that the authors are children of zeitgest , in this case that of the Kali Yuga ...
no coincidence, and this is the second major problem of the film, the shooting modes are those of Performance Capture, a technique that Zemeckis had been used in Polaris Express , and that is the resumption of movements of bodies and faces, and their metamorphosis into a digital returns in a virtual world, which is identical to that of a game, the material shot, which can then be played in three dimensions in the fully equipped rooms. Many critical lover of contamination of the genera have a miracle and has tried, but their efforts, the language of cinema to catch a glimpse of the future, but it is clear that the shot becomes a more sinister manipulation of the limits of the artifice: a Hopkins "greased "Winstone is a" gym ", an unrecognizable Robin Wright Penn, who plays the wife of Hrotgar, while only physically resembles John Malkovich himself. Disappears in short acting, and every face becomes expressionless, but are the masters of all the charms of the film "heroes" on the basis of leaps, twirls, falls, which end up turning to the camera movements based on different choices of Zemeckis directing (just for all those Contact ) in a kind of game. Certain sequences, such as the meeting between Winston-Jolie-Beowulf and Grendel's mother, not too transformed by digitization, maintain their power of expression, but on the whole burden of dangerous amateurism atmosphere ... and for all, transform the mother a mythical monster, a creature in whom end up in high heels heels.
We are in the real kitsch, no doubt. The same bad taste that brings us before a film like 300 Zack Snyder, in fact. The bad taste of today's culture, the media must appeal to all tastes. Always less than the prevailing mediocrity of junk, but the film Kali Yuga ...
Ulysses Ursini
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