In 1936, the pervasive academic attitude was that “Beowulf”—the oldest known surviving written text in the English language—was little more than a poorly crafted historical curiosity, useful only for its incidental documentation of a number of early English royal lines and events. In response, a frumpy language professor named John Ronald Reuel Tolkien delivered a 500-page defense of the work’s value as a study of myth, archetype and, ultimately, human nature. He wrote, “(‘Beowulf’) is essentially a balance, an opposition of ends and beginnings. In its simplest terms it is a contrasted description between two moments in a great life, rising and setting; an elaboration of the ancient and intensely moving contrast between youth and age, first achievement and final death.”

It’s a good bet that, in preparation for their screen adaptation, acclaimed fantasy scribe Neil Gaiman and “Pulp Fiction” writer Roger Avary read Tolkien’s assessment and took it to heart. They do a terrific job of writing between the lines, pumping all manner of blood, mead and other precious fluids into the dry old petrified bones of the original text. While remaining remarkably true to the story’s original structure (lad beats monster, lad fights mother, man fights dragon), Gaiman and Avary delve fairly deep into the story’s latent psychosexual elements, even extrapolating a few new ones of their own along the way.
They write young Beowulf (Ray Winstone) as a king-bred rock star, a bronze-cast badass born two feet taller than anyone around. A swaggering braggart and shameless self-promoter, he’s the quarterback who’s never been beat—a boiling cauldron of libidinous youthful arrogance.

Beowulf’s fall to temptation and hubris starts before he even appears onscreen, sailing across the sea to throw a beat down on an apparently unbeatable monster that’s been buzz killing the hell out of a small Danish village. Young Beowulf could give a shit that the hall of old King Hrothgar (Anthony Hopkins) is plagued and his people afflicted—he’s there for the glory of the kill; to put another notch in his axe, another verse in his own song. Not only will he kill the beast Grendel, he boasts, but he’ll do it naked and unarmed. This fight is clearly going to be the pay-per-view event of the millennium.

His brutal victory over the horrible creature only provokes ruthless and unexpected vengeance of its water demon mother, and it’s here that Gaiman and Avary’s liberties really start to take the reigns. Having established that Beowulf willfully embellishes his own tall tales, they rationalize that anything that happens to him without witnesses is fair game for re-interpretation.

Dismissing Beowulf’s dubious account of his meeting with the monster mom and re-forging the chapter as more of a “what might have happened,” they manage to create some intricate psychological relationships between the journeys of old Hrothgar and young Beowulf, tightly lashing their respective fates, and the monsters with whom they must contend, to their experiences inside the mother’s cave.

The oedipal overtones come into even sharper relief as “the hag” appears to Beowulf in the naked form of a silky throated, golden-dipped butterscotch Bond girl (Angelina Jolie). You know our hero’s in some deep Freudian trouble when his sword turns to water at her touch. Promises of kingship, fame and everlasting glory in exchange for a re-gifted drinking cup and a night in the sack would seem like a win-win to any guy in his position. After Beowulf disappears into her den for a week and then surfaces without his drinking horn and the wrong head on his pike, the writers make a strong point that there really is something a little suspicious about his assertion that she was just a nasty old bat who needed a good slaying.

The story’s heart (and, unfortunately, its most jarring narrative issue) lies in its abrupt 50-year leap forward to meet Beowulf in his final years—ruler of the land, loved by women and feared by men, his Faustian deal in full effect. Although still a walking oak of a man, his crown—won at the price of his own integrity—clearly weighs heavily. And, when the progeny of his iniquitous deal inevitably shows up to rain flaming ruin on his people in the form of an enormous golden-scaled dragon, he steps right up to the plate, straps on his old armor, and finally comes to grips with the consequences of his misguided decisions as a youth.

That this ancient, primeval tale is rendered in the absolute cutting edge of modern storytelling techniques is a fabulous conceit, a fitting echo of Tolkien’s words about beginnings and ends, but its service to the story, regrettably, ends there. Conceived from its inception by infamous techophile Robert Zemeckis (“Forrest Gump”, “Back to the Future”), deliberately to be seen huge and stunning in Imax 3-D, the settings, landscapes and characters are animated (like Zemeckis’ deservedly maligned “Polar Express”) entirely with the latest motion-capture process. The images are generated completely within a large bank of computer servers, freeing the camera to go virtually anywhere—swooping hawk-like through the heavens, down to porous, sweaty close-ups of the players. The monster Grendel, emotionally voiced by Crispin Glover, is a triumph of imaginative detail. A lumbering knot of cancerous lesions and exposed organs, flaking scales and fingernails and disturbingly mismatched teeth, the beast wails like a steam train as he rends the innocent townsfolk limb from limb. And, Beowulf’s mano e draco brawl in the final reel utterly explodes off the screen in every possible way. Unfortunately, the contrivance of these technically amazing effects is in sad disproportion to the purity of the original story.

As with “Polar Express,” the intensity of detail and breadth of bombast affords little genuine vitality to the waxwork human faces. And, as epic and sweeping as the geography is, viewers are still left with an odd but unmistakable sense of claustrophobia. The power of Beowulf’s legend has lasted 60 generations, give or take. Zemeckis might have trusted it to get its point across without the inordinate degree of gratuitous, vertiginous “comin’ at ya” 3-D money shots with which he repeatedly pokes the audience in the eye. The spectacular depth of field onscreen comes up, ironically enough, as the film’s shallowest virtue, and in a lamentable mirror of Beowulf’s legendary journey, the glory of the new seriously threatens the integrity of the old.

With that small caveat in place, however, our latest version of the Beowulf legend is still a ripping good story, and truly a sight to behold—provided you don’t get your eye poked out.