Anti-woman themes in Beowulf film?


Reading some of the reviews, I have to wonder.

I've not seen Beowulf yet, although I have had hopes.

But this review from Gay Patriot got me to thinking. Let me give you the quote.

The biggest change of the poem was how the screenwriters reinvented the monsters. In the original work, they were beings of pure evil. Here, they are spawn of various men’s lust, including that of the protagonist. These men all found the charms of Grendel’s Mother (Angelina Jolie) irresistible.

In the original, the monsters could not talk. Their lack of verbal skills helped define them as less than human. In the movie, they have an unusual vocabulary, a strange mix of some Germanic tongue spoken with a poor imitation of Slavic accent. What is it with Angelina Jolie and these odd accents? In Alexander, she attempted to affect an Albanian accent by imitating the intonations of a Russian porn star making her American film debut.

In reimagining the monsters as less than fully evil, the filmmakers attempted to create a new hero more complex than his literary inspiration. No longer a brave man with a flair for killing monsters and eager to rid the world of their stain, the film hero has become a flawed man, so easily seduced by a demonically beautiful woman that he forgets his duty. One of the primary themes of the very poem was that a good man always remembers his duty, to his King, his kin and his people.

Granted, I am talking about a third hand source. Maybe I am reading something into it. But doesn't this sound like a return to the fundamentalist attitude that the evil in the world is because of women and their unnaturally lustful ways?

Posted: Sun - December 2, 2007 at 02:52 PM
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