There are, I believe, children who have yet to emerge from the attic after fleeing from Robert Zemeckis's unintentionally terrifying The Polar Express. They had best stay there.
Once again, Zemeckis has used motion-capture technology and sophisticated digital animation to bring eerie degrees of lifeless sterility to a tale of the fantastic. This time, however, he and his team do not pretend they have an infant audience in mind. Granted a somewhat lenient 12A cert, the picture features savage disembowelment, bizarre sexual imagery and one, not entirely unwelcome, use of the word "bollocks".
So Beowulf is not intended for young children. At which demographic is it, then, directed? It's far too silly for students of the original Old English epic poem. It's not quite violent enough for dedicated horror fanatics. It will, by definition, repel that large band of mildly prejudiced adults who regard all animation as variations on Pinocchio. Fans of digital soft pornography may get on all right with it, but they don't leave the house much. Do they?
As anybody who stayed awake during the first term of his or her English degree will recall, the story concerns the efforts of a Scandinavian warrior to slaughter, first, a beast named Grendel, then the monster's ghastly mother and, finally, an unappealing flying serpent. Neil Gaiman and Roger Avary, the film's writers, have imagined a creepy dalliance between Beowulf and Grendel's mother, but, otherwise, the script is faithful to the original text.
Your opinion of Beowulf will, however, largely depend on your response to the glossy computer animation (presented in impressive 3-D in selected cinemas). Zemeckis has, bizarrely, allowed some of the actors to keep their own faces while finding new expressions for those actors seen as too old, too fat or too warty for their voices. Why, Ray Winstone might reasonably ask, is Anthony Hopkins shown in all his tubby glory while he, as the hero, finds himself transmogrified into something significantly blonder and sleeker?
That inconsistency is only mildly distracting when considered alongside the film's peculiar attitude towards sexuality and the naked body. When a nude Beowulf struggles with Grendel - pathetic in his anger and by far the film's best creation - various objects take their cue from Austin Powers and position themselves to obscure the digital tackle.
By way of contrast, the love scene between Beowulf and Angelina Jolie (very much herself as Ma Grendel) finds the actress stripped of genitals and nipples, but pumped up grotesquely in the breast area. She reaches out and caresses the hero's sword, which, as its bearer becomes visibly flustered, melts into a salty puddle at his fidgety feet.
Any hopes the film had of being taken even vaguely seriously melt with it. A toad would laugh.
