Posted on 12/01/2007 2:06:52 PM PST by ChessExpert
Anti-Christian Crusade - Beowulf is the latest installment in Hollywood’s attempt to reconfigure history
By now, the oft-recurring negative portrayals of Christianity in major Hollywood movies have become hackneyed and predictable. The recent rendition of Beowulf only reinforced this trend. The same subtle depictions and motifs present in movies from decades past were once again present, a favorite being the attempt to try to depict pagans as “open-minded” and “free-spirited” peoples, or, quite anachronistically, as medieval counterparts to the modern, secular, liberal. The idea being that pagan peoples — unencumbered by the suffocating forces of Christianity — were/are happy, passionate folk, able to live life to the fullest.
(Excerpt) Read more at article.nationalreview.com ...
Well, I don’t know about flaming. You have your opinion and you’re entitled to state it. Given you simply said what you believe, what’s to flame?
For myself, the film made one glaring error and to tell you all what it is means giving away the ending. Suffice to say that this version of Beowulf appears not to be about worthwhile heroism, which is what I take the original to be about: an elegy for a time now gone, which Christianity superseded. It’s easy to say the film goes pagan. I’d say it didn’t because it didn’t make that much sense. No pagan would do what both Hrothgar and Beowulf do and what another character appears ready to do. The elements of pagan belief simply don’t work that way.
So, the film is basically a textual hopeless case. Pretty, to be sure, well executed...well, mostly. The eyes are still usually vacant, so that problem hasn’t been fixed. The motion capture is okay, but was better when WETA Digital did it for LOTR and KK. That said, the film makes no essential teleological point and thus has no meaning beyond being a depiction of a sequence of events.
If that is all Hollywood can contrive, then Christianity has less than nothing to fear: these people can’t even think in their own terms, much less make satiric or cynical sense about Christian terms.
Beowulf and Grendel — the 2005 movie — was a sanitized, bleeding-heart liberal bowdlerization of the poem. Rather than depicting Beowulf as a hero for defeating the monster Grendel — everything gets all morally ambivalent, in a very modern, liberal, Oprahish way. Grendel is a bad because he’s been treated badly — kind of like the punks in West Side Story, who claim to be depraved, because they’re deprived. The Christian monk didn’t look very good either. Remarkable, considering it was Christian monks who first wrote the poem — based on tales from oral tradition.
Also, Beowulf and Grendel was clearly a very low-budget effort. It could have used some Hollywood SFX and other production values.
It's important to remember that the original story was about pagans, as told by pagans. It's not anti-Christian -- but, it is pre-Christian.
At one point Beowulf denigrates Christianity by stating (paraphrasing) "There have been no new heroes ever since we adopted the religion of the Christian Jesus".
Well, if you’ve seen the film then you know that what the author preserved for us is not what Zemeckis produced, at least in story terms. We have yet to see a decent version of this story, perhaps because the elements are so graphic on one level that the film fails to surmount the opening and then simply wallows in violence from then on. Or, the take is spiritual and we lose the physical element altogether.
Guess that’s the mark of a true masterpiece: nobody can make anything from it that isn’t it itself.
See Beowulf in 3D or at IMAX.
The story line was changed but still it was interesting.
Beowulf - Anti-Christian Crusade
National Review Online ^ | November 30, 2007 |
Raymond Ibrahim
Ah, it’s a small world after all.
“Raymond Ibrahim” is the same fellow that has authored
“The Al Queda Reader”.
Ibrahim is the son of Coptic Christian Egyptians that immigrated to
the USA...and he was a student of Victor Davis Hanson at Freson State U.
(VDH wrote the forward to The Al Queda Reader.)
I’m reading the book right now...it is THE authoritative translation
from Arabic of what Osama bin Laden and Ayman Al-Zawahiri actually
have written and said in interviews.
Anybody who actually reads it know we’ve got to kill these two pukes and/or
as many as possible of their disciples.
They ask us to leave Saudi Arabia, we do, they still want to kill us.
In other words, no matter what we (The West) do, they want us to die,
submit or convert. There is no other option.
I’ve not seen Beowulf. For the posters that feel Ibrahim is “reaching”
to make his point, it could be that the experiences of his parents
in an Islamic culture has colored his view of how Christianity is treated.
The Al Qaeda Reader
by Raymond Ibrahim
http://www.amazon.com/Al-Qaeda-Reader-Raymond-Ibrahim/dp/076792262X/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1196548997&sr=1-1
And you are denying that there were some heathens who resisted conversion? At the end, Beowulf sees the errors of his ways. Remember this is FICTION and really OLD fiction at that.
And I must point out again that the article totally ignores the Queen who was a good woman, a strong character, and a Christian.
It becomes muddled when you have an open atheist activist pushing a series of fantasy novels (the Golden Compass) which specifically bash Christianity and establish an atheist only (no gods) worldview (perhaps not much explored in the first film of the series).
Denial ain’t a river and just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get you.
I read Beowulf ages ago too (in a Catholic high school).
And I saw part of the Beowulf and Grendel film but had it on the background and returned the rental figuring that maybe I’d return to the film another time.
I thought that the production values were fine. I’d rather not see the same dozen faces in every movie. I’d rather not see so much computer effect. Movies have become nothing but computer cartoons. They did not look like cardboard sets from where I was sitting.
So maybe we differ on that point about the production itself. I wasn’t paying much attention as I say and they didn’t appear to try to do anything much with language of the original poem, so that leaves us with the cliff notes version of the story and none of the literature.
The 2005 film seemed to plod on a bit and I couldn’t tell if it was ever going to develop into anything or if some of the action was going to occur offscreen.
Not really...if you go back and read the text, you’ll find that Beowulf thanks God profusely for his many triumphs. Of course, these passages could have been added later by the monk scribes who put the oral story down on paper a couple of hundred years later. But all in all, the original text is very pro-Christian.
"Beowulf is an Old English heroic epic poem of anonymous authorship. Its creation dates to between the 8th[1] and the 11th century, the only surviving manuscript dating to circa 1010.[2] At 3183 lines, it is notable for its length. It has risen to national epic status in England.[3]"
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beowulf
i saw the film as well and what I got out of it was that man is not a hero and we are weak. The king made reference in the film that he didn’t need Jesus Christ to save his people from Grendal and that they just needed a hero. And what they got was another weak man who ended up hurting the people more.
So IMO the film proved a good point, without God we are nothing more than weak men.
Exactly how, specifically, is Beowulf anti-Christian?
The original story is not. The new computer graphics film is. Christians are shown to be weak, hypocritical. The character voiced by John Malkovich beats his slave for all the audience to see. That doesn’t change at all when the same character becomes a Christian with a cross prominently on his chest. He is apparently a bishop or a priest.
I loved the original tale and collect editions of the book. I had to learn how to read Old English in graduate school (almost entirely forgotten now!). I was looking forward to the film. I saw the 2005 film and found it tolerable, but not nearly what Beowulf could be on film. This new film was well made, well “drawn”, but the anti-Christian element was a surprise (it is completely against the original and completely unnecessary too).
We saw the film also....don’t remember any Anti-Christian stuff.....course, I’m not a CHRISTIAN SCHOLAR and I don’t go into a film looking for issues.
I think the author has a point. It is subtle, but it is just one more example of the mindset of Hollywood;i.e. if you want a character who is a coward or a hypocrite, make sure he professes Christianity. Unferth is the cowardly warrior in the film....so naturally, he is portrayed as a Christian..when the actual text shows Beowulf as one who reveres God and also accepts the idea of fate.
Hollywood does the same thing to conservatives and Republicans...did anyone notice that when Bill Clinton was president, we had films like “Air Force One” and “Independence Day”...where the president was heroic? Up until that point, (and since Bush took office) the president is either stupid, inept, or a traitor. I thought my husband was just being paranoid when he mentioned this to me, but....
I read Beowulf in Old English, along with much of the other heroic verse that has survived—The Wanderer, the Battle of Maldon, the Seafarer, and so forth. Beowulf is a great heroic poem.
Aside from the Christian/anti-Christian question discussed here, it is evident that this movie is NOT in the heroic spirit of the Beowulf I read, have long admired, and have read to my children in translation. There is feasting and good fellowship in the poem, and harpers singing of the brave deeds of their ancestors, but no orgies. That’s pure Hollywood.
A great deal of The Lord of the Rings and the Silmarilion are based on Beowulf and the other Old English and Germanic tales. Tolkien’s work is saturated with Anglo-Saxon attitudes. One of the main problems with the films of LOTR is that the director never really understood noble or heroic behavior.
This animated one is much more dynamic and exciting than the dour version just released a couple of years ago. The Zemeckis version is visually spectacular and very imaginative - but the cartoon renderings of the actors reduces their emotional impact. Grendel is oddly sympathetic, but not very scary. His mom is smokin hot.
Meanwhile, I hope to see Spiderman4 become a reality.
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