The Faceles Idol

 

The rains came as Jaya climbed the narrow jungle trails, but the foliage over her was so thick she felt only the drops that trickled through and dripped warm off the tips of leaves and spattered on her shoulders like blood.  The air was heavy, and steam rose from the loamy soil underfoot.  Each step and she sank in to her ankle, feeling the heat of the decay on her skin.

The trees became immense – slick gray trunks towering above her like pillars girded by vines and parasitic fungi that glowed in the darkness.  Birds flitted high above, calling out their cannibal songs, and beneath that was the domain of older and more primal things.  Dragonflies as long as her arm hummed between the branches, and moths with wings like cloaks hung from the bark, watching her with glowing eyes.  Serpents thick as her thigh crawled slow in the undergrowth, and spiders as long as a man hung their webs between the tree-boles like fisherman’s nets.

Jaya made her way with care, watchful of where she stepped.  Her people had dark legends of the terrors that dwelled in these forests, and she recalled more of them than she wished to.  She knew the stories of spiders large enough to devour an elephant, of bats that stung with envenomed tails, and serpents that whispered in human voices.  The Moon Forest, they called this place.  The domain of the gods themselves.  Not the Unnamed Gods, but older ones.  The gods of wind and rain and the shaking of the earth.

She saw tracks now and again in the dimness beneath the trees.  Water ran down the thick trunks in little rivers, and from these she could drink when she wanted, tasting the forest itself.  Here the earth was wet and heavy with mud, and here she saw the prints of feet that were not human, but were near to it.  The ape demons dwelled here in the ancient legends – neither beast nor quite man.  They hungered for flesh, and would rend it from trespassers with terrible claws.  Her most ancient ancestors had bred them from jungle apes to protect the pathways to their mountain home in the days before their conquest.

The way became stonier, and she picked out a path that wove between jagged black rocks among thorned vines, and she began to have glimpses of the heavy, cloud-covered sky.  Rain came in the morning, and again in the afternoon.  Thunder was her constant companion.  Soon she would mount the edge of the stony hills and stand upon the central plateau, and then she would face other dangers she could not foretell.

She looked back, down the long, mist-shrouded slopes, and she saw dark forms on another rocky finger below her.  Made small by distance, she knew they were not.  The apes crouched upon the stone and looked up at her, black-furred and clutching the rock with long talons.  They watched her, and she wondered if they followed, or simply marked her passing.  If she returned this way, she would learn.

It was morning when she saw again the marks of human hands in this place.  Some of the stone was cut into steps underfoot, and she saw worn faces watching from the rock walls around her, smoothed by rain over centuries until they were no more than the suggestions of human countenance.  Her ancestors watched her pass while they slept.

At the high place in the trail, under the canopy of branching, twisted trees, she found the statue.  Even covered in vines and mosses that clung, she knew the shape of Hamau, the Tigress.  Her claws still shone in glassine rock, but her face had been chipped and dashed away, leaving her blinded, and unseen.  The sight of it made Jaya angry.

This was what she had thought to find.  The heretics below her in the town had named another god, and she had seen their revulsion at the name of Hamau.  She was right to come here.  There was a great shrine of the Claw Goddess high in the mountains, and some lesser cult had burrowed into it like a maggot, and she would cut and burn them away.

She moved closer, wishing to clear away some of the vines and leaves and see what had become of the face of the goddess.  But when she reached up her hand, one of the vines moved, and she saw it flush and change color, turning a bright and luminous blue.  Scales rasped on the stone, and a serpentine body as thick as her leg shifted around the ancient idol.  Jaya saw a wide, spearhead-shaped skull come into sight, the neck coiling back and back on itself, and she saw the golden eyes of the nightmare viper.

It hissed, low and long and deep-voiced, and Jaya moved back slowly, her hand still raised, not taking her glance from the serpent as it moved, rearing up higher, tongue flicking out.  It was a big one, as long as three or four people, the head wider than her own, eyes bigger than the palms of her hands.  It swayed side to side, body heaving as it breathed.

Jaya bowed her head.  “Gentle, great one.  Gentle.  I walk in the name of Ulau, the Serpent King.  Your lord as well as one of mine.  I heed you, Death-Speaker.  I seek no harm to the idol of Hamau, I come walking in the footsteps of vengeance.  The time has come for all to be made right.”  She held up her empty hands and kept her eyes on the ground.  “I come in service to the gods.”

She held still, hardly daring to breathe, and she heard then the whispering sound that was almost words.  She smelled the sweet breath of the viper, that was said to be able to send men into endless dreams from which they would never awake, so they did not stir when they felt the sting of the fangs.  The ghost flick-flick of the dark tongue touched her outstretched hands, and she closed her eyes and waited.

Another whisper, and then silence.  She held still for a very long time, but when she looked up at last she saw the serpent had gone, and she was alone with the faceless god.  Slowly she brushed aside the vines and leaves until she could touch the chisel-marks on the stone where the face had been struck away, and she ground her teeth with anger.  She would walk to the heart of darkness on a path of fire.

Beowulf & Grendel

 

I don’t know if this is the best version of the epic that has yet been done, but it’s certainly the best one I have seen, though I have to stress that it is still not very good.  Filmed in Iceland with a strong cast, this adaptation at least has its heart in the right place, and some interesting ideas.  Part of the failing of this film is from elements that it adds, and part of it derives from the source material and flaws that are essentially baked in, but this movie is at least trying to do a respectful treatment of the Beowulf legend.

The use of Iceland to stand in for Dark Ages Denmark was a good idea, as it presents the filmmakers with endlessly cool-looking, primal vistas of land and sea to set the mood.  In a place like that, you just put an extra in armor and have him stand on the headland with a spear and bam – instant atmosphere.  The film gets a huge shot of verisimilitude from this and from the generally excellent costuming and set design.  The movie lets the vikings look colorful and use actual period armor and weapons, and it gives the whole thing an authentic feel.

The cast is pretty good here.  Gerard Butler is actually one of the weaker links, as he never really comes across – he is just a good-looking guy with ridiculous L’Oreal hair and an indestructible Scots accent.  Stellan Skarsgard is much better as the aging Hrothgar, successfully conveying the king’s despair as he fails to protect his people.  Tony Curran and a very young Rory McCann turn up as secondary characters, and the background is filled out with a bunch of solid Scandinavian actors.  Sarah Polley is here as a witch named Selma, and she is hilariously, radioactively miscast with her flat SoCal accent and her terrible wig – she seems like she just wandered in from some other movie.

The best performance here, really is from Icelandic actor Ingvar Sigurdsson as Grendel himself.  Depicted, essentially, as a kind of primitive hominid, Sigurdsson’s Grendel is a highly believable creation, and his commitment to the role creates a distinctive, frightening monster who is still very human.  He is shown as a being as capable of intelligence and emotion as anyone, but also indelibly, savagely strange, stamped with a deep hatred and sense of vengeance, and very alone.  Sigurdsson is not a huge guy, but the tricks of perspective they use to make him look like a towering monster work pretty well.

The real failing here is in the script, because the poem does not have enough action in it to fill out a movie, even when you include Grendel’s mother.  The film feels like it has to add some prequel-styled scenes to explain that Hrothgar killed Grendel’s dad and that’s why the whole thing gets started.  It also spends a lot of time showing us Beowulf before he arrives without showing him doing anything, so it comes across as slow and very talky.  The movie as a whole is slow and heavy with dialogue, which contrasts sharply with the way it was marketed as a kickass action piece.

The movie also dawdles getting to the big fight between Beowulf and Grendel, trying to draw things out and add more resonance.  An issue with the source material is that Beowulf just shows up to fight the monster with no personal stakes, and for a modern movie that’s a problem.  Here Beowulf is depicted as rather ambivalent about killing Grendel.  He sees the need to end the slaughter, but he feels like the monster has a reason for his vendetta, and as a result we have a protagonist whose motivation feels vague, and who does not really drive the action forward.  In this version, he does not even sever Grendel’s arm, but rather catches it in a snare and then the monster cuts off his own arm to escape – which is an interesting twist, but it doesn’t work.  Grendel could have easily escaped another way, and so it seems like he cuts off his own frigging arm for no real reason.

The editing and pacing of the film is rather inept, as there are long dialogue scenes that don’t really go anywhere, or that impart needed information but take far too long to do it, while important scenes often seem truncated or rushed.  Thus the movie as a whole rather lacks focus, with the central rivalry sketched but not detailed, and a hero who just seems to be there without any really strong reason to be involved.  The cinematography and action are well-done, the music is lackluster, and while the movie labors to elevate all of this into myth, it never manages it.

The production was famously difficult, and there was an award-winning documentary about the filming called Wrath of Gods that detailed the unbelievably bad weather that plagued the set and threatened the lives of nearly everyone involved.  It says pretty much all you need to know that a movie about the making of Beowulf & Grendel was far better received than the product itself, and tells a much more interesting story.