Beowulf & Grendel: A
Exceptional film. A true epic. The setting is gorgeous. Andrew Rai Berzins, the screenwriter, took the core of the Beowulf legend and built a believable (and more importantly, incredibly watchable) story around it. The main cast all did a super job (though I question the casting of Sarah Polley. She seemed really out of place, was the only one who didn't have some kind of accent or voice stylings. I found her a bit too modern in this piece.) They really got into the souls of the characters.
Through the script, Rai Berzins raised issues about the nature of violence and vengeance. Notably, Sturla Gunnarsson, the directorr, kept the blood, gore and violence to a minimum which is pleasantly surprising in such an epic film that centres around a series of violent events. The one exception I have is the rape of the witch Selma (Polley) by Grendel. I feel this one addition to the story showed a lack of imagination ... the rape resulted in a child which was a convenient narrative foil for a poignant end. The same issue could have been handled with more panache like the philosophical and psychological narrative of the rest of the film.
But the Iceland landscape is a wonder to behold. Go see it on the big screen, just for the cinematic sense of it all.
Website: http://www.beowulf-movie.com/