Sarah Polley Movie:

		List Price: $19.97		Label: Starz / Anchor Bay Salesrank: 18581 Released: November 6, 2007
		Our Price: $10.21
		Used Price: $6.97
		MPAA Rating: R (Restricted) Media: Blu-ray

Editorial Review:
Beowulf & Grendel tells the bloody tale of the warrior Beowulf's battle with Grendel a great and murderous troll. In this throughly updated version of the seminal Angelo Saxon poem the battle-scarred Norse hero Beowulf leads a troop of warriors across the sea to help an old friendKing Hrothgar whose kingdom is being ravaged by the marauding troll Grendel. However Beowulf's attempts to fight the troll are thwarted when Grendel refuses to engage him in battle. When Beowulf meets Salma a mysterious and sensual witch his understanding of revenge is further complicated. Beowulf & Grendel powerfully entwines themes of vengeance loyalty and mercystripping away the mask of the hero myth leaving a raw and tangled tale that rings true today. System Requirements:Length: 104 minsFormat: BLU-RAY DISC Genre: ACTION/ADVENTURE/SWORD & SORCERY Rating: R UPC: 013138301185 Manufacturer No: N3011

Description of Beowulf & Grendel [Blu-ray]:
The otherworldly landscape of Iceland lends an appropriate touch of dark fantasy to this modern retelling of Beowulf, the oldest epic poem in the English language. Gerard Butler (The Phantom of the Opera) brings the right balance of physicality and world-weariness as the Swedish hero Beowulf, who travels to Denmark to fight the monstrous troll Grendel (Icelandic superstar Ignvar Sigurdsson), which has been plaguing the house of King Hrothgar (Stellan Skarsgård, buried under a mound of prosthetic hair). However, what transpires is not a battle between good and evil, but a convoluted mystery of sorts, with Beowulf playing the detective who discovers that his foe is more human than monster, and Hrothgar less wronged innocent than catalyst for his own downfall. Director Sturla Gunnarsson succeeds in pulling this legendary story from the dust of academics by contemporizing the dialogue (Andrew Rai Berzins has an excellent ear for hard-bitten palaver), and his visuals are nothing less than striking, but the film attempts to be both monster movie and melancholy drama, while never quite satisfying the requirements of either genre. Regardless, the quality cast (which includes Sarah Polley from Dawn of the Dead as a sharp-tongued witch with a connection to Grendel) and some well-handled action sequences should hold viewers' attention even when the unnecessarily complex plot does not. --Paul Gaita

Beowulf & Grendel [Blu-ray] Reviews:
Outstanding
2009-12-10 - Outstanding movie! One of the closest uses of historical costuming in a movie (not perfect by any means, but much better than most any other 'historical' movie attempt).

Outstanding!
2009-10-22 - Great Movie! This rendition is 10 times the Hollywood Robert Zemeckis Beowulf, which I found to be Hollywood superhero-conquers, video game fake (my apologies to Ray Winsome, who I love). Even Gerard Butler commented about this quality, in his accompanying interview. Beowulf and Grendel is closely in touch with humanity, human history and shared ancestry. Myth and ancestry are tales passed down, about real people, and their trials and experiences - experiences we can touch and connect with - something we can take home. Beowulf and Grendel is an outstanding film! I'm on my way to purchasing it.

The Best Beowulf & Grendel!!!
2009-10-16 - REGARDLESS of what everybody else says;this is the best Beowulf & Grendel movie ever made!! No piece of Gothic SciFi crap but a true life Circumstances that plauge our world tiday. A mistunderstanding between 2 men ALMOST ALWAYS leads comes to blows!!!

An interesting look
2009-10-06 - this movie was by no means perfect but I found it highly enjoyable. I think it was well cast and it was a unique take on this classic tale. As the title indicates, Grendel is more central in this version. He is more than a one dimesional monster. He is a chracter with thoughts, and feelings, and motivations for his actions. I like this idea. I also particualary enjoyed some of the religiouse commentary that was added. I thought it was a great way to adress the fact that while Beowulf is has a Heathen Norse setting, the text that we have was obviously written down by a Christian (or possibly several), who put his religious slant on all the characters and events.

I'd recommend this for fans of the the story and also for Heathen looking for a good show with a few laughs.

Packed with action but no mahic
2009-06-20 - The scenery is flabbergasting and awe-inspiring. Beautiful mountains and fjords, vertiginous seascape and landscape, little winter and snow. It is not a film about the cold north but the heroic pagan mystery of this northern climes. Pagan with some beings coming from we do not know where, though the troll is explained very clearly from the very start as being the son of a man who was killed in some atrocious way by some Danes, just because he was coming from somewhere else and he "stole" a fish. The son then escapes and survives in nature alone. He becomes a wild child that does not speak any human language and is only looking for his vengeance on the Danish chief who had his father killed and who spared the child's life out of some human feeling. Beowulf is the one who is going to get that "troll", and the story is very close to the English Beowulf, though they try once again to make things look natural, normal. It kills in many ways the meaning and the power of some symbols, and you will never know that Beowulf used a sword from the giants who were on earth before human beings, and that this sword is decorated with runes and interlacing runic tangles. The fact that he has to resort to this sword he finds in the hoard of the mother of this Grendel, some kind of unexplained amphibious monster, appears to be a simple accident, while it is an essential and meaningful element: these monsters are the descendants of the giants that dominated the world before human beings. Some future is told by a witch but she uses bones instead of using the famous runes. The most important addition to this film, as compared to the original story, is this witch who was more or less raped once by Grendel and who got a son from him. Does this element give any humanity to the tale? I do not think so. Does it emphasizes the pagan side of the tale? Maybe but we have to say the repetitive christenings are at least counterbalancing this pagan element. The last interesting side of the film is the realistic rendition of the habitat of these northern human beings and that is neither comfortable, nor in anyway clean or well-ordered. It sure is the story of humanity emerging out of old phases of animal or pre-human existence, but this emergence is identified too much with the Christianization of Scandinavia. In one word is a good film of action though it is rather naïve as for the real anthropological or even archeological dimension of the story, and it is rather too far from the Anglo-Saxon poem to be considered as a fair adaptation of the first part of this poem. We are missing the dragon of the second part and the death of the hero.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne, University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines, CEGID