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Robert Zemeckis to Direct Beowulf Movie
jangobongo writes "Robert Zemeckis, who directed the Polar Express and Back To The Future among many others, will helm a new remake of the epic tale of Beowulf. Sony Pictures is in discussions to distribute the picture. (This version is unrelated to another remake scheduled to be released in 2005 titled Beowulf & Grendel, which is currently in post-production.)" I have no idea which version will make for a better film, but this one has Neil Gaiman and Roger Avary writing the script for it as well.
Neil Gaiman just posted about this in his online journal.
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.
That sounds like the beginnings of a cluster!
*ducks*
cant wait, this will be cool
Let the jokes begin...
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I think the only reason Cowboykneel put this story up is to see the following 'joke' 10,000 times:
Can you imagine a Beowulf cluster of Beowulf films?
Yet Another Beowulf movie? How many is this now? 5? 6?
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
Now Dan Rydel can finally say that he's seen the Beowulf movie and mean it.
Casey: "There's no movie of Beowulf."
Dan: "Then what the heck movie did I see?"
There they were, sitting in the van with all those dials, and the cat was dead. -V. Marchetti, CIA
I remember having to read beowulf during my grade 11 english class. I don't remember a thing about it :) Gotta love high school english classes.. I never had any great teachers and they always seemed to be a joke. The movie should be good though... a good director could really make it exciting to watch (and I quite enjoyed back to the future) :)
I store my recipes online (the way nature intended)
Featuring songs including:
"Gonna kill me some dead beast."
"I'm a monster, but I'm a human, too!"
"This is a long ass poem."
"Yes, that is a sword in my pocket, but I'll also glad to see you."
"Epic? I'll show you epic!"
...a modern remake of this epic tale!
;-)
What, expecting me to say something else?
Remember the story about the computer program that is supposed to pick out hit songs?
Is there some computer somewhere telling people to make Beowulf clones?
I mean, I can see why a studio trying to cash in on the latest formula (Lord of the Rings) would be making a movie of Beowulf (I was surprised to see only one King Arthur movie) but two of them at once? Come on!
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
I know that Beowulf is a cluster of Linux servers, but what is a Grendel?
Insert Generic Sig Here:
I had to read the book for school and was relly looking foward to it, until I found out it had nothing to do with clusters.
Robert Zemeckis was also the director of Forrest Gump. This movie has the potential to have a pretty wild success.
every time i hear about beowulf i instantly flash back to 10th grade english class and start drifting off to sleep.
i'm gonna cast my vote right now for the neil gaiman version right now just because i love everything i've read by him.
I'm against picketing but I don't know how to show it.
Surely this can't be any better than the version with Highlan^H^H^H^H^H^H^H errr, Christopher Lambert in it!
So now theres two Beowulf movies coming soon and two War of the Worlds. I think its interesting to watch interpretations of the same source material by very different teams of filmakers. But I think this is the first time airs of movies have opened so near each other in time.
You are so boring that when I see you my feet go to sleep.
I did a quick IMDB search and found a 1999 beowulf, a sci-fi version. Musta been straight to video.
Bacardi + slashdot = negative karma.
Grendel's mother is so fat, she have to... well... I mean, she's so... actually, I guess she is large, but mostly that has the effect that she's menacing to tough medieval warrior types. Hmmmmm.
Tweet, tweet.
Then again, Hollywood hasn't ruined *everything* it has touched (think of the LotR movies.) There might still be hope.
Many Bothans died to bring you this sig.
they should spead old english and have modern english subtitles it would make the movie even better
Will it be done in Anglo-Saxon, or in that sucky post-Norman dialect?
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Proof that the only idea that still exists in movie-making is 'Let's drag X up and recycle it.' I predict the Beowulf movies will be at least as good as Troy and Alexander.
'Sparrow.'
Hollywood is a ridiculous echo chamber. After a millenium and a half, they finally make a Beowulf in 1998, after a century of movies, so they make another in 1999. Then they make another two in 2005. They're more "me, too" than Usenet. Ever since the biz stopped being run by gamblers, it's gone straight down the tubes.
--
make install -not war
Yeah, just imagine it!
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
There's a lot of them. It's like an entire cluster of movies.
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
Will it include honey nut clusters or just them weird computer-thingy-ma-jiggy ones? We don't want to confuse the public with their breakfast and spyware infested super networks now do we?
I like muppets.
We'll finally be able to see who Grendel's Mom really is...
It's too bad that neither film is based on the LEGACY OF HEOROT
by Larry Niven, Steven Barnes, and Jerry Pournelle. I really enjoyed this book when I read it, but it's been a while.
Quoth Patrick Sauriol, News Editor: "The original Beowolf poem was written at least a thousand years old ..."
Admittedly I'm not the authority Henry Higgins was, but still shouldn't this read "a thousand years ago"?
Doesn't that pretty much answer the question right there? I mean... no disrespect to the Icelander and his crew making the other film, but... Gaiman's shopping lists are more entertaining than most screenwriters' final drafts, and hardly anyone writing for any medium today does legend/mythology better.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
I was disappointed...
I was hoping this'd be from Niven's Known Space... the life and times of Beowulf Schaefer.
("Neutron Star" and "At The Core", for instance... even though the core story is a bit out-of-date given our current understanding... and something even Asimov had to revise in "Prelude to Foundation".)
Heck, I wonder if anyone will ever do a video game (like Tombraider) based on the life and times of Miles Vorkosigan...
I can point you to millions of people who can confirm that
the Mel Brooks version!
This sig seemed like a good idea at the time....
I thought Beowulf was a high-performance computing cluster: http://beowulf.org and that's Grendel: http://www.cacr.caltech.edu/projects/beowulf/Grend elWeb
The lead is to be acted by Scandinavian hip-hoppe artist Will Smythe, and re-titled Beowulf and the Boyz. The move tagline is: Beowulf is in the Hizzy!
Check out "The Thirteenth Warrior" with Antonio Banderas, believe it or not. Based on the real writings of a travling muslim cleric that ran into a bunch of Vikings at a funeral. The novel/movie takes that and runs with it, right into the Beowulf story. Actually very enjoyable, and well done, I thought.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
I was quite surprised when I actually read Beowulf to find out that there's a lot more than just Grendel and Family, that just the first half of the book or so. Later on there's some warring, a lot more speeches, some speeches about warring, then a battle with a dragon. Yet other than some references that came from that latter section I'd never actually been aware of this additional portion of the story, it was quite perplexing while reading the book when I thought it had "finished" and I was only half way through! I can see why they do this, the Grendel bit of action really is pretty cool and is a much easier story to tell, but it changes the subject from the poem where it's a story about Beowulf (which includes a surprising amount of character growth) to the story of his battle with Grendel (which includes a bunch of cocky speeches).
:)
I really doubt it will be the full poem but I can always hope
I stole this Sig
I predict this wont do well. The red state people wont like this movie.
The 98 release was a 30 minute made for TV cartoon. The 99 release stared Chistopher Lambert. I really don't count either of these as serious screen adaptations. I'm glad that Beowulf has been taken on as a big budget production with a talanted director and writers.
After the Normans came, they all started picking up all those wussy french words.
So what happens once Hollywood has remade every story familiar to Americans and first published on or before December 1922? Will Hollywood finally get the guts to demand a repeal of the unwritten policy of perpetual copyright on the installment plan? Or will the entertainment industry all have merged into one conglomerate that incidentally doesn't have to worry about infringing its own copyrights?
staring Christopher Lambert with short blonde hair, set in a post-apocalypitic world. Now that was a bad movie, and the overly used sex scenes didn't add to the movie, though were enjoyable for there moments of interlude.
I hope that Gaiman takes some influence from John Gardner's Grendel , which attempts to tell the story from the monster's point of view. I wouldn't expect most writers to know about it, but Gaiman? It's a good bet.
In short, it tells the story of how Grendel first tries to make friends with the humans and is attacked out of their fear, and then is later used as a scapegoat for Hrothgar's (the human king's) treachery. He responds by attacking out of anger at the humans' pettiness and hypocrisy, outrage at the storyteller's lies about him.
Marillion did a song based on the book and it appears on their CD, B-Sides Themselves . The song is somewhat reminiscent of Genesis' Foxtrot in parts, highlighting Marillion's origin as a Genesis cover band.
"It is our blasphemy which has made us great, and will sustain us, and which the gods secretly admire in us." - Zelazny
Gaiman says Zemeckis wants to do it with motion capture, like he did Polar Express.
Me, I think they could save a lot of money by just doing stop-motion with some plastic action figures of the characters.
It'd look just as realistic as Polar Express did...
September 2011: Looking for Cocoa/iOS work in Boston area Cocoa Programmer Quincy, MA
I made a more accurate cinematic version of the epic poem for my high school English class, entitled "The Beo Wulf Project." With WWF wrestling
WWF? You wrestled pandas?
well, I tried...
I too read John Gardner's "Grendel" a few years back. Although it's a short novel, it is an amazing look at nihilism and an interesting take on the Beowulf mythos. If I'm not mistaken, there was a cartoon version of Grendel made some time back....although I can't possibly imagine one.
Actually, the IMDB lists only one movie titled Beowulf, and it wasn't at all like the poem. There's also an animated short which sounds a lot like a project I have wanted to do for a while.
Thing is, Beowulf is famous primarily because it's the oldest example of something, not because it's a particularly good story. At its core, it's kind of a dull story: a man goes out and beats up a monster. And that's the good part; in the second half he goes out and beats up the monster's mother, and dies in the process, but it's all kind of murky. (Sorry for the spoiler, but the book has been out for twelve centuries; if you haven't read it by now it's your fault.)
In the original it's a fascinating read, from a linguistic point of view. The connections to modern English are tenuous but visible if you know where to look. The style is very different from the Greek-inspired poetry style we think of as epic poetry; the rhymes and meter are replaced by alliteration and a less strict line length with a pause in the middle.
The new translation by Seamus Heaney preserves a lot of that and gives a good taste of the original, but it's important more because of its age than because it's telling a great story. (Though I'd love to have a reading of it by James Earl Jones.)
I've actually wanted to do a Beowulf project myself, but instead of telling the story I'd read the poem aloud as narration to a nearly silent visual recreation of the story. Sort of a documentary recreation of the event, as accurate as possible in terms of costumes and set. The DVD would come with two soundtracks: the poem in English and the poem in the original, both synchronized to the visual. The actors would speak Old English when dialogue appears in the poem, with subtitles as necessary.
The IMDB lists an animated project which sounds a lot like this, with some top-name actors as voice talent (Derek Jacobi, Joseph Fiennes). Harrumph.
That would be classic.
I can't wait for the part where Beowulf and Unferth, portrayed as an animated bunny leap into the time-wagon to go back and warn Hrothgar that he is going to grow up to be an asshole.
I'm one of those few that actually read and re-read the book for enjoyment and not for classwork, and I can say I'm NOT holding my breath. It's 99% probable that the movie will be completely shitty, and be like a 'Trainspotting' with swords and monsters.
It is incredibly hard to get the movies based on books from another era right, because back then, people acted, talked and thought completely different from us. They had different dreams, they were interested in different things, etc etc etc. And most of the Hollywood pseudo-medieval garbage is only concerned with the outside - swords, armor, horses and all those things. I see no reason whatsoever that this one will be different.
I didn't see it in the post, nor in the cursory read I gave the replies.
Anyhews, they do have a site for the movie:
http://www.beowulfandgrendel.com/
I'm hoping for great things from the Gaiman / Zemeckis duo here.
Looks like there's no dragon in it, "yet." YET? Uhhh... epic epic? Not another Trilogy?!! Time will tell, I suppose.
Get some booty here! That'll keep you warm today! GroovyBooty
I just re-read the latest (and imho greatest) Beowulf translation by Seamus Heaney. (If anyone is interested in re-reading it, this translation is stunningly good.)
The problem with making a major film version of the poem is that Beowulf is the most anti-Hollywood tale ever told. When most people summarize the story they reduce the lengthy plot down to something like this: a foreign hero comes to a land plagued by a horrible demon, slays the demon (and the demon's mother) and lives happily ever after.
Unfortunately for Hollywood screenwriters, that's not the whole story. Beowulf is a far more modern tale about a rarely discussed subject: Life in the aftermath of fame. Its an almost depressing story about a hero whose greatest achievement occurs early-on in his career. Beowulf slays his adversaries surprisingly soon in the text -- and then must live on in an exhausted world (filled with far less glamour) for the rest of his long days.
The story ends -- without another climax, without another conflict. At times the reader has to wonder, "where's this story going?", and the truth is: It isn't going anywhere, and neither is Beowulf. And that's the painful part of the story -- that Beowulf's finest years and greatest deeds are already done.
Its hardly the stuff of Hollywood blockbusters, and the chances are good that the story will be Hollywood-ized with an abbreviated ending. A far more interesting (and accurate film) would include the bulky second part of the poem where the conflict shifts from man vs. monster to man vs. himself.
-Popo
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
Waitaminnit, has Beowulf fallen into the public domain already?
I feel fantastic, and I'm still alive.
Has everything. Feisty queen, wet husband, flawed hero with spectacular attributes (Cu Chulainn did an Incredible Hulk transformation 1500 years ago), setpiece personal combats, battles, and a few additional legends to provide subplots. And it's Culture with a capital C, and no charge for an option on the script. Of course in the past Hollywood has struggled with the Irish language, but after Alexander I have a solution: Play Cu Chulainn with a Greek accent.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
In Soviet Korea, Old Beowolfs make clusters out of you!
Roses are red
Violets are blue
In Soviet Russia
Poems write you!
not funny
stop posting it
------ hi mom
A funny thing is that after Neil Gaiman wrote this script, a lot of people he told misheard "Beowulf" and thought he had written a script for a "Baywatch" episode. He took this misuderstanding and used it in a creative way, writing the short story "Bay Wolf", which is about a werewolf detective hired to protect people at a beach gym from attacks by Grendel every night.
I read Sphere and Congo, and realized that they were the same story---six to a dozen characters enter a remote and dangerous situation, half to two third of them die, and they return to civilization.
I was pleasantly surprised that Eaters of the Dead didn't follow the same formula. It may not be your thing, but it's not like the five hundred page bricks that he craps out every year and a half to top the bestseller lists. ibn Fadlan was a real person, and a pretty interesting one at that.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
I thought one of the major points was that Beowulf brought home the bacon, as well as the mad shiny riches, to his king and later to his people, and that was what made him so heroic in the story. 'Cause I remember that they were always talking about the loot that Beowulf collected.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
This is a dork site! Someone else here reads comics! Right? Right?
*sigh*
Grendel is also a series of comics created by Matt Wagner, but with peripheral stories done by other writers and artists.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
That's "hypocrisy", not "hypocracy", you burbling twatcrust.
Really, I'd only be satisfied if the British used Dr. Moreau's botulinum-anthrax hybrid to kill the Martians, then orchestrated a secret Masonic coverup. "Officially, the Martians died of the common cold. Any Londoners died of Martians."
Anyone else a "League of Extraordinary Gentlemen" fan here? Anyone?
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Oh, man, if you believe that Hollywood cares about getting original material, you're nuts.
Besides, they've got plenty of authors who optioned their estates, like Isaac Asimov or Philip K. Dick, so they can piss on their graves for many years to come.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Have you seen 1995's "Theodore Rex"? I had the misfortune of picking it from a pile of tapes to pass the evening. It's... well, it has to be seen to be believed.
Prepare to eat your hat, sir.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
So. We have seen many a slashdotter
Grieve and grumble greatly over films.
"Classics ruined!" they clamor. "Memories killed!" they cry.
Should Greedo shoot first? Surely nay.
Why then should they not whimper and whine
When they hear this horror, a Beowulf film!
Scyld Scefing? Shield Sheafson? Sam Soros?
Which woeful name for the screen will be chosen?
Michael Crichton told a tale once;
The movie was made, many watched.
Sadly it sucked. Sigh.
English is easier said than done.
....will it be just the one, or a whole cluster?
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
There's also a fairly recent book entitled _Grendel_ that looks at the entire story from the monster's point of view
I was hoping someone would mention that. That'd be John Gardner's Grendel , published in 1971. Which I guess is recent compared to the 8th century.
"I was Grendel, Ruiner of Meadhalls, Wrecker of Kings! But also, as never before, I was alone."
- In Soviet russia, the beowulf cluster (of congresses) directs YOU. ...and the opening sequence of the movie has already leaked on the internet : it contains a n3kid picture of Natalie Portman petrified with hot grits.
- All your movies are belong to Sony
- Netcraft confirms : Robert Zemeckis is dying, he hasn't done any good movie since Evolution
-
- In north Korea, only old people watch movie about Beowulf, young people re-tell the story while playing in an MMORPG
- I for one welcome our new overlords with bad taste humour.
- ???
- Profit !
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
I never watched it because the reviews of it were so awful, but Michael Crichton's book (EATERS OF THE DEAD) was actually a modern re-telling of Beowulf, and it was made into the movie THE 13TH WARRIOR, starring Antonio "youcantunderstandmythickaccent" Banderas.
Ironically, the word ironically is often used incorrectly.
I'm kinda new here but is this ok?
In Soviet Russia Beowulf directs a Robert Zemekis movie.
Does Grendel shoot first?
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
I read part of Beowulf in high school (of course) but didn't read it all the way through, and enjoy it, until I read Seamus Heaney's translation a couple of years ago. One thing I found striking while I was reading the later portion of the book, which wasn't required reading in high school, was how much Tolkien borrowed from Beowulf.
:)
He borrows from Arthurian myth among other things, but the whole bit about the thief sneaking in and stealing a goblet from the dragon, and the dragon razing the countryside, was obviously taken from Beowulf.
In the grave on the hill a hoard it guarded,
in the stone-barrow steep. A strait path reached it,
unknown to mortals. Some man, however,
came by chance that cave within
to the heathen hoard. In hand he took
a golden goblet, nor gave he it back,
stole with it away, while the watcher slept,
by thievish wiles: for the warden's wrath
prince and people must pay betimes!
Yadda yadda yadda... this etext translation isn't as good as Heaney's.
Now before I get modded down, I be to remind whoever might read this that what I am saying is FACT. - bogaboga
These millions of people will actually say a 'grendel' is a 'slot'(*)! This could be going in the direction of an x-rated movie?
(*) Ask anyone in Amsterdam, for example. Maybe ask it in dutch too.
That's a shining example of wikipedia's downside. Did you read through the quality of the article's written English? It was horrific. I've made some cursory edits, but it needs someone to re-write, methinks.