THE MOVIE

According to the Internet Movie Database, Beowulf is a science fiction update of the famous 8th century Saxon epic poem about the knight who battled a monster in a medieval castle. Christopher Lambert plays Beowulf, a man born half of heaven and half of hell, complete with special powers (his fatal wounds heal quicker than small wounds on an ordinary man). He alone does battle with an army of men only five minutes into the film, using an array of fancy weapons and his martial arts skills including an amazing backwards kickflip.

It is set in a castle somewhere in the post-apocalyptic future. A medieval-looking army has quarantined the area, nobody is allowed to leave the place because a creature is slowly killing off all the people that live there (I don’t understand the logic in it either). Beowulf arrives one day and offers his help in defeating this creature. He is allowed to hunt the threat, a blurry, purple coloured creature called Grendel which kind of looks like a cross between predator and alien. This creature finds humans rather appetising. It’s also nocturnal, only coming out at night to devour warriors. He defeats this creature, or so he thinks. But he didn’t count on the creature having a mother. Suffice it to say that Beowulf must eventually do battle with this beautiful woman who transforms into a multi-limbed monster.

THE TRANSFER

Video:

This film has a 1.85:1 widescreen (16:9 enhanced) transfer. The disc is a single sided and single layered, but doesn’t seem to suffer from any artifacts which sometimes occur as a result of high compression. The video transfer is far better than I was anticipating, although I guess it is to be expected when the DVD comes with a Gold Standard Quality sticker on the case and the Sony Pictures DVD Center authoring logo before the movie. Quite a great deal of the movie is shot in the dark and the black levels are very good. The picture is sharp with the exception of the purple coloured creature which is sometimes a little blurry, perhaps to disguise the lackluster CGI.

Audio:

This movie has two audio formats. Spanish Dolby Digital 5.1 and English Dolby Digital 2.0. I’m not sure why the English soundtrack is only two channels, whereas the Spanish version gets the works? That said, the Spanish Dolby Digital 5.1 version wasn’t much of an improvement over the English Dolby Digital 2.0 soundtrack in any case, it’s not really that much more dynamic than the two channel version. The thumping soundtrack doesn’t allow you much of a chance to hear these subtle effects in any case. Dialogue isn’t always clear, although I don’t think this is related to the transfer. I think quite a number of the actors just mumble, they need to work on their diction, maybe take a leaf out of Patrick Stewart’s book. Again, the thumping soundtrack sometimes made it difficult to hear the dialogue, as it drowned out the actors voices. However, I must admit that I quite liked the soundtrack, the upbeat tempo contrasted the visual landscape and made the film quite an interesting experience.

THE EXTRAS

On the back of the case you will notice that they list original widescreen presentation, original theatrical trailer and a picture disc as special features. These can’t really be classed as extra features even though the US theatrical trailer is one of the best I’ve seen in quite a long time. It has been cropped to an aspect ratio of 4:3 (Pan and Scan), the sound format is Dolby Digital 2.0 and it runs for approximately two minutes. The only other special features so to speak of is the talent profiles, which is simply a number of short biographies for the main actors in the movie, Christopher Lambert, Oliver Cotton, Rhona Mitra and director Graham Baker. You would think for a movie which was only released last year, there would be an interesting array of extras included on the disc.

SUMMARY

I can’t remember this movie ever being shown at the cinema. If it was, it can’t of been around for long. But they say you shouldn’t judge a book by it’s cover, and to a certain extent, DVD’s are the same. I was expecting this movie to be rather tragic, but I was pleasantly surprised. I’d suggest that if you enjoyed Mortal Kombat, then you’d like Beowulf.