Review of Beowulf (2007) by Chads. — 08 Dec 2007

Wiglaf(Brendan Gleeson) is like the guy in John Ford's "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance" who says(about the Jimmy Stewart character), "When the legend becomes truth. Print the legend.

" This adaptation of the eleventh century historical poem by an anonymous writer is about as literary as Roland Joffe's torching of Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The Scarlet Letter", but it has an accidental sophistication, an intertextuality which transforms this special-effects extravaganza into an ingeniusous display of meta-fiction.

It's fun to imagine that Wiglaf is the anonymous poet who wanted to honor his friend, so he left out the juicy innuendoes and concentrated on Beowulf's good points. As a writer of the times, an epoch in which our literary heroes were archetypal, infallible men of bravery and valor, it's only natural that Wiglaf would neglect to document his friend's affair with Grendel's hot mom.

This seemingly stupid Hollywood take on a hallowed text from the English canon is not so stupid if you're aware that it's widely speculated among theologian scholars that the Old and New Testaments were censored texts.

This movie transforms the original "Beowulf" into a censored text.