First things first: This is not the eighth-century epic poem you read in high school. Grendel's mum, that "monster of women," wasn't played by a purring Angelina Jolie even in the best-selling Seamus Heaney translation, nor were the human's and beasties' family trees entwined in ways worthy of a nighttime soap. Anonymous is doubtless rolling in his/her unmarked grave, but, hey, what's oral tradition if you can't improvise a little? Or a lot.
Second things second: "Beowulf" is director Robert Zemeckis's latest attempt to make a feature-length movie using digital motion-capture, a process in which actors' movements are tracked on film via sensors attached to their bodies, then "drawn over" using expensive computer-animation technology.
In "The Polar Express," the result was a cast of zombie children and a creepy, soulless Tom Hanks. The good news is that the technology has improved and that the cast of "Beowulf" merely looks like they have the squints. Occasionally they lumber about woodenly, like Weebles with Actors' Equity cards, and the character of Queen Wealthow (voiced by Robin Wright Penn) does seem to be on loan from the DreamWorks Animation stable. At its worst, the movie suggests "Shrek" on steroids.
At its best, though, "Beowulf" dares to be absurd in ways that open the whole heroic-quest genre to weird, playful scrutiny, and it occasionally takes flight into the plain amazing. The screenwriters are the cult novelist/comics author Neil Gaiman and "Pulp Fiction" co-writer Roger Avary, neither the sort of man to do what he's told. This is good for the movie, if not for college Comp Lit courses.
The setting, at least, is still Denmark in the early sixth century, and Herot, the hall of aging King Hrothgar (Anthony Hopkins) is still plagued by a rampaging monster named Grendel. Already you sense Zemeckis and his writers are up to something: Hrothgar is a fat, deluded Dionysus with Hopkins's face plastered on, and Grendel, who resembles the Frankenstein monster with his innards on the outside, is voiced with piteous homicidal sympathy by Crispin Glover.
