Outlander is no Beowulf
“So. The Spear-Danes in days gone by/and the kings who ruled them had courage and greatness./We have heard of those princes’ heroic campaigns.” — opening lines of Seamus Heaney’s powerful 2000 verse translation of
Beowulf.
Outlander makes no secret about its desire to be a fantastical re-imagining of the Beowulf story and its “heroic campaigns” we are taught in high school, where the hero defeats the monstrous Grendel and a host of other horrors before dying nobly in battle against a dragon (sorry for any spoilers – you should have read the poem). Set in late eighth century Norway, the titular Outlander is not the Geat Beowulf come to save the Danes from Grendel, but instead Kainan, a very human-looking alien (played by John Caviezel), who crash lands on Earth, and in doing so sets free a monster (the “Moorwen”) which seemingly takes the place of all the beasts referenced in the original poem. Kainan first must convince the Norsemen he is not a threat, and then leads them against the monster, with predictable results.
And that’s the real issue with this film: there’s nothing here that we haven’t already seen, and not just in that long poem. Outlander cribs a bit from Alien here, a bit from Predator there, and then throws in a smidge of Braveheart for good measure. Moving beneath all of this is a not-so-effective sub-plot that seems to want us to feel some, if not sympathy for the Moorwen, than some recognition that it, too, has been wronged, but John Gardner’s Grendel did that, too. The battles between the Norsemen and the Moorwen are appropriately violent, though I rarely felt a sense of horror, which is a fatal flaw for such a film. Together the movie moves stiltedly toward its conclusion, as if it were walking on legs not its own (which, of course, it is).
Beowulf has been re-imagined a number of times, most notably in Antonio Banderas’ underrated The 13th Warrior, which retells the legend through an Arab’s eyes. Outlander is not quite so rousing as Warrior, which was both adventurous and fun, nor are its characters as memorable. Caviezel’s Kainan is distant in his relations with the Norsemen (perhaps justifiably so – he IS an alien), but this also precludes the audience from forming some attachment to him. The Norwegians are a conglomeration of long-haired noble (and not-so-noble) ruffians, with little to humanize them and make us care about them before they’re in turn eaten up by the monster.
What we’re left with, then, is another in a long string of effects-driven monster films, whose chief problem is that it depends too much on what has come before. And, as Beowulf suggests, living off past deeds is no way to make a name for oneself.
35 Responses to “Outlander is no Beowulf”
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February 2nd, 2009 at 7:47 pm
FlashCap is wrong. This movie rocks. It’s not a deep movie by any means, but the action is good and I’ll watch Vikings vs. Dragons, especially Alien dragons, any day of the week.
February 6th, 2009 at 5:37 am
FlashCap is right, The 13th Warrior leaves this for dead.
I do grant Outlander one thing it looks great, but the dialoge is cliche and predicable as hell.
What made me cringe the most, is when one of the warriors says “We are Vikings!” I don’t think the 7-8th Century Germanic seafaring iron-age peoples of what is Norway and Sweden called themselfs Vikings but just “the people” like many indigenous tribal group did in the past.
Now I’m really getting pedantic the film it has Aliens in it after all, they could call themselves Hobbits for all I care it wouldn’t have saved the bland script that goes nowhere.
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