Over the Top and Far Away

I'm one of the only people I know who wasn't required to read Beowulf in high school. I did eventually read it in college, but I have to admit that it wasn't really an enjoyable experience. I wanted to like the book, but I spent so much time trying to determine what was being said that it was difficult to get a handle on what was happening. For that reason, then, most of my experience with the story is derived from movies made based on the tale.

This hasn't always been a good thing. Let me show you why.

The first Beowulf movie I ever saw - in fact, my first experience with the tale at all - was the 1999 movie Beowulf, starring Christopher Lambert.

This movie is some kind of re-imagining of the original legend, taking place in an odd industrial-fantasy world where Heorot is a castle that serves as some kind of military outpost, with Hrothgar ruling over it. He has a daughter by his dead wife, and is being menaced on a regular basis by a monster called Grendel whose motives and origins are unknown to his men.

Into this crisis comes Beowulf, a bounty hunter of considerable skill. Said skill is demonstrated early in the movie when he thrashes some soldiers around on his way to Heorot. Once there, he offers his services in slaying the monster. He is accepted, but plenty of Hrothgar's warriors seem to dislike him. There is some intrigue at the castle involving Hrothgar's daughter and her dead husband, and Beowulf's presence seems to open this old wound.

Meanwhile, Hrothgar's daughter takes an interest in Beowulf, which he takes some pains to stem. He is apparently part monster himself, and this gives him the strength and insight necessary to defeat Grendel. However, he can't handle the thought of his monstrous genes being passed on.

Eventually, it comes to light that Grendel is Hrothgar's son by a demon who has inhabited the castle and its grounds for time out of mind. This demon is understandably angered when Beowulf succeeds in killing Grendel, and decides to take her vengeance. Needless to say, she is thwarted by Beowulf. However, in the end, only he and Hrothgar's daughter remain alive, and so the two go riding into the sunset.

There are a lot of problems with this movie, foremost among them (for me) being the fact that Beowulf is meant to be seen as a sympathetic character, someone laboring under the curse of being half-monster. But there's little reason why this should seem to bother him. Aside from being solemn and withdrawn, there's really nothing unusual about Beowulf's appearance or behavior (considering his occupation) to mark him out as anything other than human. And while Christopher Lambert may be a competent action guy, I'm not convinced of his ability to act convincingly. That's really the central problem, here. We're supposed to sympathize with this character, but there's nothing to him. Beowulf is a man in a long black coat with a "cool" sword who kills monsters. He is as one-dimensional as the character in the original poem, which isn't a good thing.

Another specific problem I have with this movie has to do with Grendel's mother. She's meant to be a seductress, but she has all the subtlety (not to mention the fashion sense and looks) of a porn actress.

The fight scenes suffer from looking choreographed. By this, I mean that they don't look natural. The characters seem to simply be going through the motions of fighting, giving the appearance of combat without any of it actually feeling real

Generally, though, one of the bigger problems is the lack of a budget. The costumes and props look like... Well, they look like costumes and props, as opposed to clothes and weapons. The sets look like sets, and the effects are pretty unimpressive, even for 1999. Grendel is possibly the worst offender of the bunch, covered as he is with a cheap, fake-looking purple and brown blur effect which prevents the characters and the audience from getting a good look at him, which is probably just as well. If you look closely enough, you can tell that the Grendel costume, bad as it looks with the blur, would look even worse without it.

To contrast against the awful 1999 movie, we have 2005's Beowulf and Grendel, which walks a fine line between being a straight retelling of the original story while also attempting to be historically accurate.

Here is a picture of the Dark Ages as that time period undoubtedly was. The people live and work in the dirt, the mud and the rain. Everything is gritty and dirty-looking, the warriors' armor and equipment looks battered from regular use, and manners and mannerisms are crude by our standards.

In this variation, Grendel is portrayed as some sort of cryptid, the next-to-last of a dying species. He isn't human, but he's close enough to it to father a child on a human woman. His grudge against Hrothgar stems from the Danish king's murder of Grendel's father.

Beowulf, as in the legend, comes to the court of Hrothgar upon hearing of the attack, bound by honor to help the man who fostered him for part of his childhood. But he takes a more intelligent approach to this troll-hunt. He asks questions, trying to determine the monster's purpose, and eventually uncovers the reason for the animosity Grendel harbors toward Hrothgar. He pities Grendel, but at the same time cannot swerve from his course. Honor and obligation bind him.

This particular retelling of the tale adds a character named Selma, a witch and an outcast who lives at the edge of civilization, secretly the unwilling mother of Grendel's son. She also pities the monster, one outcast to another, and while she helps Beowulf, she does so unwillingly, and only because she can see no other course of action.

Considering the source material, it's surprising to find that Beowulf and Grendel is more character-driven, focused largely on the two title characters than on the action. Beowulf's battles with Grendel and Grendel's mother are fairly short and to the point.

Still, while it's an enjoyable movie, it isn't one I find myself wanting to watch often.

For one thing, it's jarring to hear the mix of accents - Scottish, American, British - in a group of characters who are, by and large, supposed to be culturally homogenous. And the way the script bounces back and forth between formal language and foul can induce a kind of mental whiplash.

More than that, though, there seems to be something that's just missing from the movie. I can't tell what it is, exactly, except to say that while Beowulf and Grendel seems to be perfectly competent on a technical level, it's missing something, maybe heart and soul. The result is a movie that falls just this side of mediocre. A quote on the front of the DVD case showed it being rated at three stars, which I think is probably just about right.

And then...

And then we have 2007's Beowulf. Let me quote Roger Ebert here, because I feel his words are appropriate.

"To say the movie is over the top assumes you can see the top from here."

It starts off with a noise complaint. Now, in our modern era, if the neighbors are partying a little too loudly, we might go over and knock on the door, and ask politely for them to keep it down, some of us have to work in the morning. And if things get really out of hand, we can call the police. But this being the dark ages, and Grendel being a monster (in fact, the ugliest creature on planet Earth), things are handled a bit differently.

Grendel's problem, quite aside from a lack of proper skin care, is that he has an extremely sensitive ear. So when Hrothgar's warriors are celebrating the construction of their new mead-hall, Heorot, with drunken, hedonistic debauchery and abandon, it wakes Grendel up at night and drives him into a rage.

His response is to knock down the mead-hall door and begin a furious rampage, tearing men limb from limb, stomping them to death, drinking their blood, throwing them across the hall like rag dolls. Barbaric as this may be, you have to admire its effectiveness. Hrothgar outlaws merry-making until the monster is killed.

Beowulf hears of this and immediately sets out from Geatland with his warriors. He owes Hrothgar a debt, but just as important, this is an opportunity for him to prove his greatness.

Beowulf is a hero of the old tradition. By that, I mean that he is a great man, but not necessarily a good one. He is obsessed with earning glory and honor for himself and his men (though most importantly himself). He does heroic deeds, not because they are right, and not because they must be done, but because they increase his fame and standing. Danger, the prospect of injury or death, serve only to excite him. They are not obstacles, but opportunities to prove his greatness to the world and expand his legend.

He is a maker of heroic boasts, and yet at the same time, there seems to be just a hint of truth in them. And certainly, he proves that he has the ability to back up said boasts when his men, through loud song and laughter in the mead-hall, lure Grendel back for another round.

He fights Grendel naked, on the logic that, since Grendel has no weapons or armor beyond what the gods gave him, neither should Beowulf, in their encounter.

Clearly, this is a man for whom grand gestures are a way of life.

Of course, all manner of steam, smoke, candles and sword hilts are deployed in order to hide Beowulf's package which, in keeping with the character himself, must surely be heroic.

The battle is epic, completely over the top, with much leaping and thrashing about, and in the end, Beowulf rips off Grendel's arm with a wooden door.

Understandably, this upsets Grendel's mother, a water demon who is nonetheless devoted to her children. For her revenge, she murders all of Beowulf's warriors while they sleep, except for Wiglaf, who was away. Beowulf is then tasked with finding and slaying Grendel's mother.

Here is the first major divergence from the original story. Beowulf's mother appears in the form of a beautiful, gold-skinned woman, and offers to make Beowulf a king of vast renown, a man who will be remembered thoughout the ages, if only he will give her a son, and return to her the dragon-shaped drinking horn he received as a gift for slaying Grendel.

Perhaps Beowulf senses that there will be more glory in store for him in the future, if he takes this offer. The deal is made: So long as the horn remains in her keeping, Beowulf will be unkillable, rising ever higher in fortune and glory.

Beowulf returns to Heorot, taking Grendel's head with him. He tells the story told in the original tale: How he fought Grendel's mother in an underwtater cavern, and how the sword Hrunting (given to him by Hrothgar's loyal lieutenant, Unferth) was lost in that battle, and why he must present Grendel's head, and not that of Grendel's mother, as proof of his exploits.

Hrothgar may be a man of foolish deeds, but he is not a fool. He knows the truth, and knows what truly occurred in the underground lair, for he himself was there. Grendel was his own son, sired on the demon Beowulf claims to have slain.

Knowing, now, that the curse has been continued, Hrothgar proclaims that, as he has no son of his own, Beowulf shall be heir to his treasure and his kingdom, even to his wife. So saying, he departs from the narrative, and the movie picks up, as the book does, many years later.

Beowulf has bargained for more, and yet less, than he realized. He did not know himself. He did not understand himself well enough to realize that it is not the accomplishment itself that drove him, but the challenge. And when the challenge is removed, the joy and the meaning were drained from his life. Thus we see the grey and grizzled Beowulf, still strong, but now for seemingly no purpose. He is a conqueror, a legend in his own time.

Eventually, the drinking horn that he surrendered to Grendel's mother finds its way back to him, and he realizes with horror that his pact with the demon is now broken. From there, the movie gives us a fanciful, characteristically over-the-top rendition of Beowulf's fight with the dragon, and ends more or less as the book does, with its hero's death marking the end of an age.

I like that this version of the story, of the three I described, has the sense to take the original tale to its ultimate conclusion. Too many movies are tempted to give the audience what it wants, a happy ending where the hero rides off into the sunset with the admiring love interest. Even the ostensibly "dark" and "edgy" Beowulf of 1999 does this.

Personally, I believe that audiences do want a happy ending (don't we all?), but I also believe that they can respect and appreciate being denied one, if the integrity of the story demands it. 2007's Beowulf demands it. With only one or two significant alterations of the original tale, it would have been a crime against the intent of the movie to present anything less than the proper ending.

Judging by how much I've gone on about the 2007 treatment, you can probably guess which one I think is best.

In the Shadow of the Valley Uncanny

Sometimes, Resident Evil confuses me.

I don't mean the story, of course. The story of any of the Resident Evil games is pretty simple, really. We are talking about a series of games based on George Romero's zombie movies (famously begun in Night of the Living Dead). There's not much plot to speak of. It's more of a premise, and the story is about the attempts of the various characters to survive (or not) given that premise. Not exactly fine art, you know? Not quite avant garde.

Yet somehow this series of games that is so clearly based inspired by, and full of homages to, Romero's body of work manages to make for some pretty awful movies.

I'll confess that I never saw more than the opening few minutes (not more than a half-hour, I'm sure) of the first American-made Resident Evil, but I didn't feel I needed to. It defied both the basic story (excuse me, "premise") of the games, and also the general feel of them. I stopped watching after that first half-hour because this seemed to have nothing to do with the games at all, aside from the name and the presence of zombies. Making a decent movie that was faithful to the spirit of the original games ought to have been easy, given its lineage, but apparently it wasn't easy enough.

So I haven't paid any attention to the movie series, and I certainly don't feel as though my life has been any poorer for it.

Then one day I saw a DVD on the shelf at Wal-Mart. Resident Evil: Degeneration. It looked like a CGI movie, and it had Leon Kennedy as the main character. Sure, it also had Claire Redfield from Resident Evil 2, but Leon was the one I was interested in. Not because he's a particularly deep or multi-layered character. He's not. But he is the hero of what is easily my favorite game in the series: Resident Evil 4. So I thought about it for a while, and I finally broke down and bought it last night. I felt the need for some mental junk food, and it was cheap. I figured, why not?

I have no real problem with bloodshed and violence. I don't really get into it the way I did when I was 13, and the best way to make anything better was to spill gallons of blood and have lots of explosions. It doesn't bother me, really, it just doesn't interest me much, either. So normally, I don't care much for horror movies.

Which is good, I guess, because Resident Evil: Degeneration isn't one.

What it is, then, gets sort of difficult to define. It's basically a generic ation movie, but with zombies. In that sense, it's faithful to the spirit of one of the games, at least: Resident Evil 4. Yes, I know Resident Evil 4 lacked zombies. Shut up.

There's no real horror in Degeneration, no real suspense. When the heroes walk down a corridor, guns at the ready, and all is quiet, you know that some zombies will be appearing shortly. It doesn't require you to have a good working knowledge of zombie movie structure. It's just logic. When the good guys have guns and are walking through dark, quiet hallways, something for them to shoot with those guns will be appearing presently.

But Degeneration goes further than this. It actively pulls the rug out from under the suspense early on, when Leon tells his comrades that the only way to kill the zombies is to shoot them in the head. Well, thanks, Leon. Now you've robbed us of that classic moment where people start shooting the zombies in the chest and limbs, and the zombies shrug it off and keep right on coming.

Maybe I should mention the plot, before we go too far.

The movie starts by explaining how Umbrella Corporation developed and accidentally released a virus that turned people into zombies, which caused an enormous scandal and required the U.S. Government to take care of the outbreak by launching a nuclear missile at Racoon City, where the outbreak occurred. Umbrella's stock bottomed out, the company collapsed, etc. Then a new company, called WilPharma, began working on the same viruses that Umbrella accidentally leaked. When WilPharma opens a new branch in Harvardville (not far from Racoon City, apparently), there is naturally protest. WilPharma's research into the T-virus (which is what causes the zombies) is also opposed by the organization TerraSave, which has been responsible for disseminating photos and footage of zombie outbreaks in India, where one of WilPharma's research centers is located.

One of TerraSave's members is Claire Redfield. She comes to Harvardville in advance of a Senator who is one of WilPharma's primary stockholders, and a spokesman for the company. For the remainder of this writing, I'll be referring to him as Senator Scumbag, because that's an apt description of his character, and also because I can't remember his name.

Anyway, the zombie outbreak begins early in the movie, at the airport not long after Senator Scumbag arrives. She, Scumbag and a handful of others are trapped in a room at the airport while the zombies run rampant. Eventually, the police S.R.T. (which stands for Special Response Team, or something similar) puts up a perimeter around the airport, and gets word that the White House is sending an operative.

The operative is Leon Kennedy, looking virtually unchanged from his appearance in Resident Evil 4. The only real differences are that he now wears a black jacket, and he looks more pissed off than he was before. He takes two S.R.T. members with him on his rescue mission into the airport, and escapes with a shocking minimum of casualties.

All the while, the zombies aren't so much menacing as they are gun fodder. They exist to be shot down and make the heroes look cool in the shooting. Then the plot thickens.

There was a moment about halfway through the movie that got my hopes up. After Leon rescues the airport crew (including Senator Scumbag, alas), WilPharma sends in a fleet of trucks with T-virus vaccines to administer to the victims, along with one of their ranking executives, named Frederick. Claire chews him out for a moment, demanding to know why WilPharma didn't send the vaccine in advance if they had it all this time, and Frederick calmly fires back that if not for TerraSave putting WilPharma in an adversarial position and screwing up their operations, they would have been able to send it in advance. Leon, with information straight from the White House, confirms this story.

For a moment, I thought this might be interesting after all. I couldn't think of a movie I'd ever seen that featured a generally benevolent corporation whose humanitarian efforts were hindered by a rabid protest organization. That might have been genuinely clever.

But no. That's not actually how it works out in the end with Degeneration, but I'll spare what few details remain. Suffice it to say that there is a typically Resident Evil unkillable monstrosity that menaces the characters at the end which must be beaten in an unorthodox way. There follows a series of escapes and some last-minute parkour by Leon (which was actually sort of fun to watch), and then it's more or less back to business as usual for the people of Harvardville, though of course there is a dark twist of the story at the very end (which is also very typical).

This entire movie looks like it was made with an Xbox 360: good, but still not terribly real. And it suffers from an ailment that afflicts many Japanese video game cutscenes, which is over-gesturing. Perhaps it's because the directors of these things fear (more or less rightly) that their CG doesn't have the necessary power to carry off all the communication that goes on by way of facial expression and natural body language, but there are several times characters make overly pronounced gesticulations in order to get the point across.

I think of this as Power Ranger Syndrome, because that's what the Power Rangers did when they were in uniform and talking (because their faces were obscured, you see). It sort of kills the immersion, because you realize pretty quickly that people do not make the sorts of gestures that some of the characters in this show make. Maybe Japanese people make that little arm-waving "whatever" gesture that the police captain makes toward the beginning, but nobody in America does that. And considering that this movie (like the games it is based on) is set in the American Midwest (the presence of mountains notwithstanding), you would think that the original makers would take things like that into consideration.

I'd like to take a minute to complain about the dialogue, also. It's pretty generic stuff, really, barely worth mentioning. Which is sort of the problem. The games got their reputation partly because of awful dialogue. The "Jill sandwich" and "Master of unlocking" lines have been a part of game-geek culture for a good long while now. I came into this expecting bad dialogue full of corny one-liners and stilted acting, and instead got dialogue built on a rock-solid foundation of generic mediocrity.

But what am I saying? This is Resident Evil, after all. Good, natural dialogue? Geographical accuracy? Cultural accuracy? Whatever am I going on about?

This is a movie about people shooting zombies and looking (more or less) cool doing it. It encourages you to turn your brain off. Practically requires it, really. And if you can manage that, you will be vaguely entertained. But it strikes me as an awfully low mark to shoot for, to be vaguely entertaining, and even then only to those who are actively trying not to think.