The Valley of Winds

 

For the first time in her life, Jaya left the sea behind her.  All the days since she was born she had never gone beyond the smell of the salt and the sound of the waves, the cry of the sea-birds when dawn came or the winds at dusk.  Now she turned her path northward, away from the shore, into the mountainous heart of the island of Tarakan, away from anything she had ever known.

She passed through terraced farmlands, avoiding any contact with either her own people or the giants who traveled the black stone roads.  The land lay under mist and rain, and it was not hard to remain concealed.  It galled her to turn her back on scourging the invaders, even for a time, but now the tiger shrine called her, and she could not believe that was an accident.  If she would follow the will of the gods, she must be ready to answer when they spoke.  The forbidden heartland of her race called to her, and she would heed it.

The land rose up and up, the trees growing taller and the roads less well-kept, until once again she followed foot-worn trails through the mud.  On the third day she stole sandals from a farmer’s hut and strapped them on, for the way was becoming more stony and rough, and she believed it would only become more rugged as she climbed.  She had never seen mountains close, and the few glimpses she had through the stormclouds looked too far away and too immense to be real.

The path led upward, through a series of narrower passes between hills, and she saw fewer villages, fewer signs of the things of man.  Only here and there did faded columns or worn archways mark that once her race had built great things on this soil.  Stone heads watched her from the hillsides, half-covered with moss, their features all but worn away.

There was a last village, and she found it empty, the houses abandoned and the roofs falling in.  She found no bones, no signs of death, but the lodges stood empty, many useful things still inside.  Glad of the chance, she went inside and gathered dried meats, a new waterskin, and some javelins for hunting.  She found new laces for her sandals and spent the evening repairing them, cutting them to fit her better.  Already she had walked much farther than she ever had before.

Beowulf (1999)

 

If you were counting down the worst adaptations of the Beowulf story (which I guess I kind of am), this one would be fighting it out for the bottom spot with the 2007 big-budget version.  I only rate that one as a bigger failure because that movie was a $150 million major studio effort with a huge amount of talent to draw on, while this one is a bargain-bin straight-to-video disaster of the kind that were all over video stores in the 90s.  With a bleached-blond Christopher Lambert in the title role and a then-unknown Rhona Mitra as his bland love interest, this one is a complete mess from minute one.

Rather than attempt a historical epic, this movie sets the Beowulf legend in a vaguely-defined post apocalypse, with Heorot replaced by an “Outpost” on an undefined border between warring armies of leather-clad S&M fetishists in ridiculous costumes.  Everything in the wardrobe design is way over the top, with horned helmets, spikes, straps, and skull masks.  You would think that would make it cool, but this is so cheap and so poorly filmed that it just looks dorky.

Hrothgar is not a king in this movie, just the lord of this bleak outpost that is now plagued by a monster that kills and blah blah – we know the deal here.  This kind of thing doesn’t have to be boring, but again, this is very badly directed, and so the performances are bad, the dialogue is bad, and everything just seems to take way too long.  Takes are long, the shots are static and just look at people doing nothing, saying nothing.  Everything comes off as tremendously awkward, like an amateur theater production.

They spent a lot of effort on the fight choreography, adding in a shit-ton of unnecessary backflips, jarring cuts, and wacky-looking weapons to try and inject some pizzazz, but it just comes off as tremendously silly.  Beowulf has an arsenal of weapons that seem to have been designed by 9-year-olds, including rapid-firing crossbows, a telescoping flail with a spike that comes out of the bottom, an axe that has a sword hidden in the hilt, and a bunch of daggers concealed everywhere in more and more elaborate places.  The backflips, in particular, look ridiculous, as Lambert’s stunt double will do literally 15 backflips away from the monster and then get smacked down anyway, so all that work never seems to do him any good.  His fighting style seems to be “when in doubt, do a backflip,” to the point that if you took a shot every time, it would kill you.

The Grendel design is kind of not bad, even if it has the expected Giger vibe to the look of it.  They obviously just had a cheap rubber suit, which they try to hide by putting a camera effect over it, to try and simulate the monster having some kind of field that makes him hard to see.  That’s a cool idea, but executed here it just seems like he’s got a blur filter on all the time, and it’s painfully obvious they are just trying to cover up the rubber suit.

Interestingly, this movie arrived at the “Grendel is Hrothgar’s bastard son” idea almost a decade before the Zemeckis movie.  When Grendel’s mother shows up, she is literally some Fredrick’s of Hollywood model in a wispy negligee and fucking crimped blonde hair (not kidding) who gives a long speech about killing Hrothgar’s men, leaning hard on the “hot blood pumping down my throat” and similar vulgarisms before she turns into a ludicrous CGI monster.  She looks like a spider made of bat wings rendered by a PS1, and has an entirely unconvincing battle with the backflipping hero until she is incinerated by the Outpost’s negligent fire safety standards.

It really is painful.  Believe me, if my description of this makes it sound like it might be a fun kind of terrible, it really, really isn’t.  It is mostly just boring and clunky, and Lambert especially seems like he is wishing he were somewhere else every moment he is on screen.  I only rate this as the second-worst Beowulf movie because it is just 80% painful to watch, as opposed to 100%.

The Black Road

 

Jaya followed the path, the dirt trampled smooth and hard by the passage of many.  It offended her to see it cut into the soil of this holy island.  She tried to harden her heart to it, knowing she would see many more such outrages before she was done.  She set her mind to eradicating the presence of the giants upon this land, and she swore she would water the earth with their blood in answer for their crimes.

The rains came, and she sheltered by night beneath the spreading leaves of a tamaka tree.  Soon the rains would come more heavily, and then the season of the monsoons.  She wondered if the giants could endure that, though if they had been here for years, they must know the way.  Part of her wished the islands themselves could drive out the invaders.  Then she thought that she was the answer to that – that the gods had called her because she was chosen to drive the enemy away.

Several days brought her to a place of wider fields, and she saw many of the Utani working in the long rows.  They cultivated rice and beans and breadfruit trees, and she watched them from a distance, laboring under the hot sun.  Here and there she saw giants moving among them, watchful and malignant, and she yearned to kill them, but she knew she could not become involved in a struggle here, so far from the seat of their power.  She must go to the sea, to the place called Jinan.

Beowulf (2007)

 

There have been a number of film adaptations of the story of Beowulf, and it’s not hard to see why.  It’s not only the first written English story, it’s a compelling story about heroism, sacrifice, and the battle against evil.  It also gives a film great excuses to put all kinds of cool monsters on the screen.  So I thought I would spend some time this year reviewing all the versions I can get my hands on.  I already did The 13th Warrior some time ago, so I will kick off here with what I think is the very worst version ever done: the 2007 disaster directed by Robert Zemeckis.

The first thing to really deal with is how much talent there is involved in this movie, and how it was all so deliberately and criminally wasted.  Ray Winstone is not exactly A-List, but at the time he was on a high, having starred in movies like King Arthur and Cold Mountain.  There was a feeling that he was on his way up, rather than what ended up happening, which was his sidestep into character acting, where he has remained.  You also have Anthony Hopkins, Angelina Jolie, John Malkovich, Brendan Gleeson, and Robin Wright among others.  Many of these actors (like Jolie and Malkovich) were such hot properties at the time they bordered on radioactive, so it remains even more mystifying how they ended up in this turd.

The biggest misstep is Zemeckis’s decision to render this all in CG, using the motion-capture technology he’d pioneered in Polar Express a few years earlier, which I think we can all agree looks like ass.  There were people impressed by it then, but oh boy it has not aged well, and it makes this movie look like a video game cutscene on a PS2.  Zemeckis is an odd filmmaker, with genuinely good work in his resume, like the Back to the Future trilogy and Romancing the Stone.  But he is too-often seduced by the lure of fancy technology, producing showy but empty crap like Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Forrest Gump, and Contact.

The other mistakes made here are legion, and more than a little ridiculous.  The look of Beowulf himself is supposed to be based on Jesus – no I am not kidding about that.  Why Jesus would look like a towering Viking warrior is not explained, but I would guess the reason rhymes with “shmacism”.  The characters all look like they have been glazed over with some kind of putty, and the artifacts of the 3-D technology means everything looks smeary and dark, with as much stuff as possible poking out at you.

The art design is a criminal mess, as Grendel – the coolest monster in fiction – resembles a massive, parboiled fetus that just isn’t interesting or pleasant to look at.  The dragon at the end is a depressingly boring design that looks like one rejected from a Harry Potter movie.  Angeline Jolie plays Grendel’s mother, and rather than the ogress we would expect, she is basically a sweaty, naked Angelina Jolie covered in golden slime, wielding a 14-foot prehensile braid and equipped with built-in stiletto heels.  I only wish I was kidding.

This brings us to the weirdly sexual themes worked into the story where they did not exist before.  We first have Beowulf depicted as battling Grendel in the nude – only this is a PG-13 movie, so we can’t be allowed to see Beowulf’s dong flapping around, so they make sure there is always something in the way in the foreground so we don’t.  This just reminds one of the same gag in Austin Powers, and renders one of the most iconic confrontations in fiction unintentionally comical.

There is lots of commentary on Beowulf having a huge cock, lest we forget that he is supposed to be the “physical ideal” – you know, like Jesus.  He goes to confront Grendel’s Mother, and rather than fight, she seduces him.  See, Grendel is supposedly Hrothgar’s son, and he is all grody and fucked-up looking because Hrothgar gave her weak, sad, old-man sperm.  She wants Beowulf’s super-manchowder, and she gets it in a scene where she literally strokes and caresses his sword until it melts into silvery goo that gushes over her thigh and drips down to her stiletto-heeled feet.  No, I am not making that up.  This plot idea makes the dragon Beowulf’s son, thus not only obliterating the Platonic ideas that fueled the original, but making this just another stupid Hollywood movie about Daddy Issues.

So Beowulf kills Grendel in the nude in a scene that makes it really seem like he is just murdering a handicapped person, and then he doesn’t kill Grendel’s Mother but fucks her and they have a dragon-baby, who looks boring and comes to kill him for some reason and then he kills it but he dies – at least they got that right.  But then that leaves Mama Jolie unharmed and ready to pump out another monster baby for the next hero who comes along.  It all makes complete hash of the story’s themes and ideas without replacing them with anything compelling.

It’s just a mess.  So much talent wasted among the cast, so much money spent on technology that just makes it look worse than if they had filmed it practically with the money they had available.  This movie cost $150 million and it looks like some mockbuster from the Ukraine, the quality of the CG is so terrible.  The script is bad, (and let’s not forget that Neil Gaiman worked on this) the performances are bad, and the characterization is almost nonexistent.  Then you have the bizarre sexual focus of the story just adding a degree of sleaziness that brings the whole thing down, and it all adds up to a movie that I bet a lot of the participants wish had never been made.  I know I do.

Blood Oaths

 

The dawn revealed a desolate shore, and Jaya stood on a jagged grip of rock and looked out over the horizons now closed to her.  The storm had passed and left the seas slow and uneasy, waves crossing and shifting with the uncertain winds, and nowhere was there the sign of any other living human form.  The strands was littered with the tide-mark of the sea-weeds, and there were scraps of driftwood as well as pieces of her shattered ship, the wracked boards jutting from the sand like ribs.

Here and there she saw the wash of the waters disturbed by lumps that did not stir, and she knew them to be corpses.  She had walked one to the other, seeing the faces of her Ekwa, and one of the former slaves, but no sign of Dhatun, nor of Bastar.  She was not certain which one she had most hoped to find alive, and that troubled her.

To the far south the sky was a wall of smoke, billowing high into the blue, a dark shadow across the limits of her sight.  Here and there she saw the flickers of the lightning that reached between the pillar of smoke and the mountain, but the island itself was far beyond her vision.  Streaks of darkness painted the air above her, but she had come a long way from the reach of the volcano.

She found her sword among the tide-pools and took it up, washed by the sea.  She carried it above the tide-mark and scrubbed it with sand to dry it.  The sheath was still on its cord about her waist, but she would have to let it dry before she used it.  She found a hard piece of black stone and sharpened the bright steel, glad of the craft that had made it in another age.

Now she found herself returned to the islands where her ancestors had ruled, and she looked inland, seeking some sign.  This was no small island, for north of her the land rose up in green folds higher and higher, and at the limits of her sight were the snow-touched peaks of mountains like she had never seen.  All was hazy with distance, lit by the golden rising sun, and she hungered for the name of this place, for the piece of her history she now stood upon with bare feet.

First she must find fresh water, and so she set out to the west.  To the east the land was rocky and forbidding, so she took the easier path.  The shore was wide and white, and crabs scuttled from her shadow as she set the sun behind her and followed it.  Along the shore until she could find a stream, and then she would start inland.  Along a waterway she would find what people there were, and they might tell her where she had landed.

She carried her sword ready, thinking on her lost ship, and on the dagger face of Lozonarre, so close to her, so near to her final stroke, and yet he had escaped her.  She had drawn blood from his leg, and now his face, next time, she would let out his life entire.