Ka Leo O Hawaii

Issue date: 11/21/07 Section: Mixed Plate

Media Credit: Courtesy of Paramount Pictures Ray Winstone plays an arrogant Beowolf and later shows emotional layers under his brutal persona.

"Beowulf" is the latest of many antiquity films, which started in 2000 with "Gladiator." Thankfully, "Beowulf" has the advantage of being based purely on myth - complete with dragon - and hardly attempting realism.

Aside from a few unnecessary edits, some rendering problems, improper marketing and the greatest alteration to Beowulf's story yet, the movie's pretty solid, entertaining and truly deserves to be watched.

"Beowulf" is computer-animated, cutting out the middleman between actors and digital surroundings. As an epic drama, this hardly feels appropriate, and at times the frame rate doesn't keep up with the truly "busy" scenes. The facial renderings are much better, capturing the subtlest expressions. Grain, rust and splinters make up for most of the clean, polished surroundings that often appear unnatural.

Neil Gaiman, of the acclaimed "Sandman" series, and Academy Award-winner Roger Avary adapted the legend of the famed hero with a simple twist that will upset generations of readers familiar with the story.

Thankfully, Gaiman and Avary acknowledge that legend does not always mean truth - the truth, seemingly, contains vicious sea-monsters, sirens and a dragon. The story that readers are familiar with becomes the great conspiracy of the film, forever haunting Beowulf to his last years. Director Robert Zemeckis takes the story on a dark path, playing to the demographics of "300" fans, pushing the PG-13 rating to its limits with tons of gore and adult themes.

In the film, Beowulf (Ray Winstone) arrives in Denmark to dispatch Grendel (Crispin Glover), a mentally impaired, decomposing giant who plagues the kingdom of the hedonistic Hrothgar (Anthony Hopkins). After victory over the nightmarish sympathy junkie, Beowulf is put on the path to murder the beast's mother (Angelina Jolie, directly translated from "Alexander").

The foreshadowing leads you to believe that Grendel's mother is a fishy monstrosity with the scales of a Chinese dragon. Instead, she appears as a beautiful, nude goddess, bathed in gold with a promise of power, in the fashion of fertility goddess Ishtar. None of this should come as a surprise, since the film's marketing spoils half the plot in trailers.

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