Examples Of Christianity In Beowulf
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Beowulf Pagan or Christian
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The concept of the tragic flaw of which Hrothgar warns Beowulf was first expounded by the Greek philosopher Aristotle , with Sophocles' Oedipus Rex as the ultimate example in Greek literature. However, as much as the Greeks spoke of the tragic flaw , there is still a strong sense of the heroic in their epic literature. Heroism and arrogance are to be admired as long as the hero does not strive too close to the gods and the heavens.
It is not until well into the medieval period that Christianity reaches full bloom and the quality of heroic arrogance falls into disrepute. The Christian philosopher St. Augustine helped to turn man away from this earthly arrogance and the desire for material wealth and success. In Augustine's City of God , he attacks pagan culture and its pantheon of gods, blaming them for the decadence of society. It is Augustine's ideas that we see in Beowulf , tempering the heroic arrogance of the great warrior. However wide the dichotomy of values may be, Beowulf appears to have achieved the difficult balance between pride and humility.
For example, at the end of Further Celebration at Heorot Beowulf returns the sword Hrunting which turns out to be useless in his battle with Grendel's mother. But instead of taunting Unferth, Beowulf praises the sword: " Beowulf is a mix of two ideals: the heroic warrior of the pagans and the humble selfless servant of the Christians. He doesn't have to worry about lighting. The actors don't have to hit marks. They don't have to know where the camera is. It's pure performance. Actors on set wore seventy eight body markers. The cameras recorded real-time footage of the performances, shots which Zemeckis reviewed. The director then used a virtual camera to choose camera angles from the footage which was edited together. Two teams of animators worked on the film, with one group working on replicating the facial performances, the other working on body movement.
The animators said they worked very closely on replicating the human characters, but the character of Grendel had to be almost reworked, because he is a monster, not human. Over graphic designers were chosen for the project, the largest team ever assembled for a Sony Pictures Imageworks -produced movie as of In the cases that using cached data was not possible, the scenes were rendered using foreground occlusion, which involves the blurring of different overlays of a single scene in an attempt to generate a single scene film.
Other elements of the film were borrowed from that of others created by Imageworks: Spider-Man 3 lent the lighting techniques it used and the fluid engine present in the Sandman , while the waves of the ocean and the cave of Grendel's mother were modeled after the wave fluid engine used in Surf's Up. The film Ghost Rider lent Beowulf the fluid engine that was used to model the movements of protagonist Johnny Blaze. So much data was produced in the course of the creation of the film, the studio was forced to upgrade all of its processors to multicore versions, which run quicker and more efficiently. The creation of additional rendering nodes throughout Culver City, California was necessitated by the movie's production. In designing the dragon, production designer Doug Chiang wanted to create something unique in film.
The designers looked at bats and flying squirrels for inspiration, and also designed its tail to allow underwater propulsion. As the beast is Beowulf's son with Grendel's mother, elements such as Winstone's eyes and cheekbone structure were incorporated into its look. Grendel has patches of gold skin, but because of his torment, he has shed much of his scales and exposed his internal workings. He still had to resemble Crispin Glover though: the animators decided to adapt Glover's own parted hairstyle to Grendel, albeit with bald patches. Zemeckis insisted that the character Beowulf resemble depictions of Jesus , believing that a correlation could be made between Christ's face and a universally accepted appeal. The music for Beowulf was composed and conducted by Alan Silvestri.
A soundtrack was released November 20, One objective of Robert Zemeckis , Neil Gaiman and Roger Avary was to expand on the original poem as it has been recorded. Beowulf is generally considered to be a pagan tale written down by Christian monks, which for Zemeckis and Avary represented the possibility that the original story had been tampered with in order to better fit Christian sensibilities.
In order to restore those points, they offered their own interpretation for motivations behind Grendel's behavior and for what happened in the cave of Grendel's mother, justifying it by arguing that Beowulf acts as an unreliable narrator in the portion of the poem in which he describes his battle with Grendel's mother. These choices also helped them to better connect the third act to the second of their screenplay, which is divided in the poem by a year gap.
This is not the first time that the theme of a relationship between Beowulf and Grendel's mother was explored by Gaiman. In his collection of short stories, Smoke and Mirrors , the poem Bay Wolf is a retelling of Beowulf in a modern-day setting. In this story, Beowulf as the narrator is ambiguous about what happened between Grendel's mother and himself. Grendel's mother is represented in the film as a castrating, monstrous female who threatens masculinity. This is metaphorized by Beowulf being seduced in her womb -like cave, where his sword strike magically fails at harming her body. Grendel and the dragon act as extensions of her will, "mindless embodiments of feminine aggressiveness" who represent their fathers' emasculation and loss of patriarchal power.
Later Beowulf claims to have vanquished the mother, having supposedly rendered her dead with his sword in her cave, but the falsity of this only translates as a wishful , pretended triumph of the male over the female. His defeat to her, as well as his bargain for prestige and glory, transmits that male power "not only comes from the feminine, but remains eternally subject to it. This has been interpreted as a last exaltation of masculinity, electing to die in self-sacrifice rather than living in his impotent, feminized state. The film contrasts those points to the original poem, using the " postmodern techniques of metatextuality and deconstruction ". However, the main difference from the poem is portraying Beowulf as a flawed hero destroyed by his own negative qualities, [15] [20] like lust for power and unchecked male desire, [18] which raises questions about the morality underlying heroism.
The studios planned to use 3D projection technology that had been used by Monster House another motion-captured animated film that Zemeckis was involved on, but only as an executive producer , Chicken Little , and 3D re-release of The Nightmare Before Christmas , but on a larger scale than previous films. Beowulf would additionally be released in 35mm alongside the 3D projections.
Originally, Columbia Pictures which also distributed Monster House was set to distribute the film, but Steve Bing did not finalize a deal and instead arranged with Paramount Pictures for North American distribution and Warner Bros. Critics and even some of the actors expressed shock at the British Board of Film Classification rating of the film — 12A — which allowed children under twelve in Britain to see the film if accompanied by their parents. Angelina Jolie called it "remarkable it has the rating it has", and said she wouldn't be taking her own children to see it. Kiernan , was published in September The characters are voiced by the original actors who starred in the film.
The side-scrolling action video game was developed by Gameloft. Several cast members, including director Robert Zemeckis , gave interviews for the film podcast Scene Unseen in August This is noteworthy especially because it marks the only interview given by Zemeckis for the film. The theatrical cut includes A Hero's Journey: The Making of Beowulf while the single disc director's cut features four more short features. The website's consensus reads, "Featuring groundbreaking animation, stunning visuals, and a talented cast, Beowulf has in spades what more faithful book adaptations forget to bring: pure cinematic entertainment. Giving Beowulf three out of four stars, Roger Ebert argues that the film is a satire of the original poem.
It all suggests that this kind of a moviemaking is more than a stunt. By imagining the distant past so vividly, Zemeckis and his team prove that character capture has a future. I've never seen a 3-D movie pop with this kind of clarity and oomph. It's outrageously entertaining. Tom Ambrose of Empire gave the film four out of five stars. He argues that Beowulf is "the finest example to date of the capabilities of this new technique [ Beowulf is a huge step forward [ While the technology has improved since 's Polar Express particularly in the characters' more lifelike eyes , the actors still don't seem entirely there. Kenneth Turan of NPR criticized the film, arguing: "It's been 50 years since Hollywood first started flirting with 3-D movies, and the special glasses required for viewing have gotten a whole lot more substantial.
The stories being filmed are just as flimsy. Of course Beowulf does have a more impressive literary pedigree than, say, Bwana Devil. But you'd never know that by looking at the movie. Beowulf's story of a hero who slays monsters has become a fanboy fantasy that panders with demonic energy to the young male demographic. These creative interventions aren't especially surprising given the source material and the nature of big-studio adaptations.
There's plenty of action in Beowulf , but even its more vigorous bloodletting pales next to its rich language, exotic setting and mythic grandeur. Scholars and authors criticized the changes done upon the poem's story. Southern Methodist University 's Director of Medieval Studies Bonnie Wheeler is "convinced that the new Robert Zemeckis movie treatment sacrifices the power of the original for a plot line that propels Beowulf into seduction by Angelina Jolie—the mother of the monster he has just slain. What man doesn't get involved with Angelina Jolie? And the story of Beowulf is so much more powerful.
However, there were also positive academic reviews. Philosophy professor Stephen T. Asma argued that "Zemeckis's more tender-minded film version suggests that the people who cast out Grendel are the real monsters. The monster, according to this charity paradigm, is just misunderstood rather than evil similar to the version presented in John Gardner's novel Grendel. The blame for Grendel's violence is shifted to the humans, who sinned against him earlier and brought the vengeance upon themselves. The only real monsters, in this tradition, are pride and prejudice. In the film, Grendel is even visually altered after his injury to look like an innocent, albeit scaly, little child. In the original Beowulf , the monsters are outcasts because they're bad just as Cain , their progenitor, was outcast because he killed his brother , but in the film Beowulf the monsters are bad because they're outcasts [ From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Neil Gaiman Roger Avary. ImageMovers Shangri-La Entertainment. Pictures International. Release date. November 5, Westwood November 16, United States. Running time. Main article: Beowulf soundtrack. Box Office Mojo. Retrieved September 1, Retrieved Movies Online. Archived from the original on July 25, AWN, Inc. Retrieved November 27, CG Society. Archived from the original on May 30, Los Angeles Times. Retrieved November 28, Media Mikes. Beowulf in Contemporary Culture. Cambridge Scholars Publishing. ISBN Medieval Afterlives in Contemporary Culture. Bloomsbury Publishing. Digital Gaming Re-imagines the Middle Ages. Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. Archived from the original on December 2, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
Fleming November 29, The New Republic. Beowulf on Film: Adaptations and Variations. Ethics and Medievalism. Lyman, Eric June 13,
