YMMV / Beowulf (2007)

• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • What are the goals of Grendel's mother? Does she want to simply perpetuate her bloodline? To give birth to a new demonkind? To mess with humans?
  • Wiglaf's face at the end of the film when tempted by Grendel's mother. Is he angry at her for the tragedy she caused? Is he considering to accept her offer?
• Animation Age Ghetto: A dark, brooding, introspective Deconstruction of the original work with tons of totally uncensored graphic violence and a naked Angelina Jolie. Rated PG-13 in the United States and Britain. Go figure.
• Audience-Alienating Premise: Many people in the Anglosphere are familiar with Beowulf due to its presence in the highschool curriculum, but despite (or because) this reason, it is still a topic that appeals the most to English literature buffs and professors... who were the people most likely to get offended at the film's cynical, fantastic reinterpretation of the poem (a case of History Repeats, by the way, if one knows J. R. R. Tolkien's role in the history of Beowulfian criticism). As a result, the film tanked at the box office, and academic response to its history and changes went from mixed to raging.
• Awesome Music: The soundtrack by Alan Silvestri contains some great pieces, and in particular, Idina Menzel singing "A Hero Comes Home" is just beautiful.
• Best Known for the Fanservice: A naked Angelina Jolie emerging slowly from the water is probably the first thing people will recall about the film. That or Beowulf fighting naked.
• Everyone Is Jesus in Purgatory: Analytical works about Beowulf have had a field day interpreting this film in Freudian or gender terms, mainly on all the sexuality found in the movie, both implicit and explicit. The favorite topics tend to be Beowulf fighting naked and with a phallic sword, Grendel lacking genitalia and being childish, and Grendel's mother being a castrating seductress.
• Fetish Retardant:
  • Knowing that Grendel's mother is actually a Draconic Humanoid might cause some Squick in viewers that aren't into dragonesses. But even for those, her dragon form is not exactly very draconic either, as it looks more like a legless lizard with a dromedary-like face.
  • Her High-Heeled Feet can have the same effect when in human form. Even viewers without a foot fetish can find those additions offputting or just plain silly. The novelization (which was written by a woman, amusingly enough) doesn't even mention them.
• Genius Bonus:
  • Grendel's mother having strange feet calls to mind numerous female demons in various world mythologies who were said to have unnatural feet, those often being bird-like or hooved. Usually this was to indicate that they were not human.
  • The mother being introduced seductively with high-heeled feet might also be a clever pun on the original text. In the poem, when strength fails her, Grendel's mother unsheaths her knife and attacks Beowulf with it. A word for high-heels is stiletto, which is Italian for knife.
  • She is a seductive being and mother of monsters who comes from a race of water demons. In Mesopotamian and Greek mythology, female monsters with either of those two attributes were usually associated to water, like Tiamat, the sirens and the gorgons.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: The movie was much more unanimously liked in countries where the original English poem is not very well known.
• It Was His Sled: The revelation that the dragon is the main character's son is meant to be a plot twist (even if a rather obvious one), but this Beowulf adaptation is mostly known as "the one in which Beowulf bangs Grendel's mother and becomes the dragon's father" nowadays.
• Magnificent Bastard: Grendel's mother is an ancient being who bore Grendel to King Hrothgar to tie him to her land forever. Upon her son's death at Beowulf's hands, Grendel's mother seduces Beowulf, inspiring him to tell a false story about killing her to gain kingship while she bears his child, a golden-skinned man who becomes a mighty dragon. Using her son to ravage the kingdom and kill Beowulf, Grendel's mother ends the film about to seduce Beowulf's probable successor Wiglaf and continue the cycle.
• Narm:
  • Beowulf fighting naked, and the Scenery Censor the animators employ to hide his genitalia. It's hard to find a critic who didn't compare this to Austin Powers.
  • Grendel's character design, while pretty disturbing in its own right, can also be pretty silly due to the vaguely tongue-in-cheek look of his deformities, especially the shape of his head and face. Some noted that his skin also makes him look like a giant fish finger.
  • Grendel's mother having natural high heels on her bare feet. The design they are meant to evoke is so anachronistic that one might amuse himself speculateing that high heels in the film's universe were invented by Danes inspired by her. (Tellingly, the novelization removes them from its canon by not mentioning them on her description.)
  • Speaking of Grendel's mother, her real form can be a bit underwhelming, if not downright ridiculous. It's probably for the better that she isn't clearly shown in the film proper.
• Narm Charm: In a movie where the protagonist is the largest of Large Hams, this isn't surprising. Other characters get in on the action, too.
• Nausea Fuel: Grendel. He is Body Horror personified. Of particular note is the fact that when stabbed in the head he bleeds pus. Not to mention the fact that when he chews on Hondshew's head, his mouth drips with disgusting pus and slime, apparently from Grendel's deformed, rotten gums.
• Older Than They Think:
  • This film is often accused of plagiarizing 300, with the line "I! AM! BEOWULF!" being a bit too similar to "THIS! IS! SPARTA!" and the line "TONIGHT! WILL BE DIFFERENT!" being rather akin to "TONIGHT! WE DINE! IN HELL!" What these people don't realize is that there's a thing called Production Lead Time. Filming of Beowulf was done long before filming of 300 began.
  • The film borrows a lot from Beowulf (1999), namely Hrothgar being Grendel's father, Grendel's mother being a shapeshifting, draconic demon seductress interested in Beowulf, and Beowulf having instant, corresponded Love at First Sight for the lady of the house, who is/was in a loveless marriage before his arrival.
  • Just a couple of years earlier, Beowulf & Grendel also had Belligerent Sexual Tension between Beowulf and a mysterious woman who might be in league with Grendel, and Beowulf worrying that he might have just repeated Hrothgar's "sin" (killing a "troll" in view of his young son, in this case) and set himself for revenge by Grendel's kind in the future.
  • Conan the Destroyer of all things already featured a loincloth-wearing, headband-sporting, sword-wielding hero who was forced to infiltrate an underwater lair and fight an enemy immune to sword slashes who wanted a golden horn.
  • An obscure Japanese 1991 novel/OVA named Psychic Wars already featured a hyper-manly lead opposing an ancient race of demons that populated a country before humans did in medieval times. It similarly included reptilian, ogre-like monsters, a creature taking the form of a beautiful naked woman, the hero killing one of the shapeshifters by pulling out its small heart with his hand, and a queen that mated with human warriors through generations in an attempt to rebuild her race and desired both the protagonist and revenge for the death of her kin. One has to wonder whether this might be "just" an insane bunch of coincidences or Gaiman was at least familiar with the OVA when he wrote the film's treatment.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: Many people were offended about the changes made between poem and film. Others shrugged and considered it just another interpretation of the poem.
• Unintentionally Sympathetic: Beowulf's decision to accept the offer of Grendel's mother is meant to be egotistical and destructive, but considering that she seems to be magically indestructible, and that by accepting he at least secures a potentially endless peace for his kingdom instead of having her murdering people nonstop in revenge, it actually looks like the best option. The only alternative would have been to keep trying to strike her and get killed for the effort, thus spinning the wheel again with the next hero who would come to kill her. It also helps that the treaty was broken not by Beowulf, but by the slave who took the horn (in the movie, albeit not in the novelization). As an extra point, the novelization all but states she was magically entrancing him throughout all the process, which is also implied in the film proper, so even Beowulf's own consent could be considered very dubious.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: The film tries to picture Grendel as a childish monster who only attacks Heorot because its noise causes him great pain due to his horribly oversized eardrum. He is also clearly capable of communication, as he speaks intelligibly to Beowulf at the end of their fight (it's just that, by then, Beowulf is so fired up that he isn't interested in talking). Despite all of this, his only way of dealing with the problem from the beginning is wreaking havoc and butchering people, making him little more than a big, Ax-Crazy bully.
• What Do You Mean, It's Not for Kids?: Director Robert Zemeckis had originally intended to release an NC-17 version for IMAX theaters and a PG-13 version for regular theaters, but was forced by Paramount to deliver an R rating. The final version was rated PG-13, which surprised many people on the production (including Angelina Jolie, who did not see the film as family-friendly and refused to let her children see it).
• The Woobie: Wealthow. Both of the men she loved were revealed to have fathered monsters with a succubus and lied to get glory and power, and later she is attacked herself and almost killed by one of these creatures.

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