Beowulf is an age-old, well-worn tale. The poem has credibility with genre fanboys and scholars alike. The story has Joseph Campbell written all over it. Beowulf is a tradition, a piece of culture, a touchstone, a public domain classic of Shakespeare proportions that should yield studio gold a la The Lord of the Rings.
The truth is that Robert Zemeckis’s movie version of Beowulf turns its actors into creepy cartoons and rewrites the story as a predictable Star Wars “sins of the father” cycle that feels relevant for almost two minutes. The only thing it really has going for it is 3-D.
