Neil Gaiman's Beowulf

I really don’t want to do this.

I don’t want to criticize Neil Gaiman. I don’t want to criticize someone who I hold up as something of an idol. A writer whose career is something I aspire to, whose achievements I look to for inspiration. But I will.

Neil Gaiman and Roger Avary (Killing Zoe) co-wrote the screenplay for the new Roger Zemeckis version of Beowulf. And the word “version” could not be more apt. Because this film isn’t exactly Beowulf. It’s not what you read in high school. In fact, a better title for this film would be “Neil Gaiman’s Beowulf” or “A Roger Zemeckis interpretation of Beowulf” or even “Half Beowulf/Half Something Sort-Of Inspired by Things We Think We Found Reading Between the Lines of Beowulf”

I might have let this go. I was almost willing to, actually. Because this is not a bad film. In a lot of ways, it’s a very good film. The motion-capture technique Zemeckis uses to create a quasi-animated picture is still far-from perfect (although much improved from The Polar Express a few years ago). It’s not yet photo-realistic, and it may never be, but it holds promise for the future of fantasy and sci-fi moviemaking. But this blog is about writing, and so this review is going to focus on the writing.

The story of Beowulf, as most of us know from sleep-inducing classes in our teens, is the oldest epic poem written in English. Not quite our English though. If you read it in the original, or listen to it read in the original (as I was forced to do by a high school teacher who was very impressed with his own ability to pronounce dead languages) you’ll find it sounds something like German. It dates from a time before English became the chaotic mish-mash of Anglo-Saxon, Church Latin and Norman French that regularly boggles the minds of non-native speakers these days.

It’s old.

And that’s where I have a problem with this new version. The earliest Beowulf manuscript we have dates from around the 10th century, but the poem itself was probably composed much earlier, sometime in the 7th century or so, detailing events alleged to have taken place in the late 5th and early 6th centuries. In other words, the story hasn’t changed in about a thousand years, and it has existed in some form for maybe five hundred more. Not quite The Iliad or The Aeneid, but well-qualified to claim that it has “stood the test of time.”

Enter: Gaiman, Avary and Zemeckis, stage left.

Their version begins by following the basic storyline of the poem. The hideous monster Grendel is terrorizing the Danish lands of King Hrothgar, who sends out a call for aid. He is answered by a contingent of Geatish thanes, led by the boastful, but fearsome warrior of the title. Beowulf does battle with the beast, only to learn that Grendel’s Mother poses an even greater threat than her bestial son.

In between, a lot of mead is consumed and lot of absurd, self-aggrandizing stories are told, all of which are essentially true to the poem and to the culture of that pre-Christian age. Fine so far.

But then, just as the film should be building to a crescendo, as it does in the original poem, it deviates so far as to have almost no regard for the source material.

I won’t say any more about the plot, because that would spoil it, which is kind of preposterous when you think about it. How could anyone be concerned with posting a spoiler about a story that is older than the language this is written in?

And that’s the problem. When did it become OK to take time-honored tales and “improve” them for modern audiences? Who got the idea in their head that they were a better storyteller than Homer? That they could do a better job of relating the events of the Trojan War with Brad Pitt as a “more human” Achilles?

But “Troy” is only one of a series of recent Hollywood disgraces. How about “300?” There you have a true story so compelling that people have been telling it for millennia, a story of men giving their lives for their nation, fighting against impossible odds and doing so knowing they face certain doom, a story that has betrayal, drama and genuine sacrifice. Instead the movie version has the Persians depicted as Tolkien-esque monsters, and the Spartans as only barely more human—a group of almost robotic super-soldiers.

And we’re not even going to discuss “Alexander.”

With this Beowulf adaptation, it seems Gaiman and Avary were trying to clear up some of what they perceived to be “motivation” problems in the original. They seem to have felt that there were some holes in the story that they could fill in with a few minor leaps of imagination. In short, Neil Gaiman thought he could improve Beowulf. Maybe he did, maybe his version makes more sense, and makes Beowulf more human. Maybe he explains Grendel a little better, gives him a good reason to terrorize the Danes, so the audience can understand his character better.

All of those things are exactly what you’d ordinarily praise in a story, and they’re things that Gaiman excels at in his own stories. But this is the wrong place to do it. Beowulf has stood on its own for so long, not because it does (or does not) comport with modern rules of drama. Beowulf is a tale for the ages. It’s a time capsule of how our distant ancestors saw the world. It tells us what they valued, how they approached life, and death. Beowulf isn’t for us. It was for them. It’s their story, and the reason we keep telling it is to understand who they were, because that’s who we once were.

It doesn’t really need to be improved, just told.