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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.
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.
Depending on where you look, a Windows/Linux MUD server, or a Mozilla project building a mail/news reader entirely in Java.
Who'd have thought they'd make a movie of that? ;)
Yet Another Beowulf movie? How many is this now? 5? 6?
Indeed hopefully this one will be better than "The Thirteenth Warrior". That movie is based on a Michael Crichton book, "Eaters of the Dead", which is a rather amusing literary exercize.
Tell you what, read Neil Gaiman's blog on this, which the terrifyingly sane and sensible first poster linked.
And then retract your initial comments, when you realise that a. Gaiman is one of the two writers, b. he wrote it a while ago and Dreamworks rejected it, c. Bob Z. is making it because he was blown away by Gaiman's script.
Then start to midly freak out because it's going to be motion capture. Like Polar-Bloody-Express.
fortune -o
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.
Most around here are gonna be confused when they watch the movie and there's only one monster.
Proving the theory that Slashdotters know far more about Beowulf clusters than Beowulf.
There are actually three monsters in Beowulf: Grendel, Grendel's mother, and the dragon. (Of course, Beowulf takes them on serially rather than in parallel, and he waits a good forty years or so between Grendel's ma and the dragon.)
(Hell, even Xena got this detail right, though in the Xena episode it was (predictably) Xena who did all the arse-kicking, while Beowulf mostly looked pretty.)
In fact, there are even more monsters if you count the monsters mentioned in random digressions, such as when Beowulf is meeting the Danes and mentions how he basically swam across the Baltic in full armour carrying a sword while fighting sea monsters.
As an aside, for Tolkien fans I would recommend the essay The Monsters and the Critics by J. R. R. himself, which argues that the monsters represent the central theme of the Beowulf poem.
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.
It's one of the most horrible movies I've ever seen. The beginning is good though, a beautiful girl that flees from a castle just to get brutally cut down by an army outside. I guess it was the surprise effect that made that good, but the rest was just a pain to watch.
The Beowulf film with Christopher Lambert is one of the worst movies I've ever seen. 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, running through the woods, and driving a pickup truck like listening to Extreme, it was still better than the 1999 film.
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