Alvin Lee would give the movie Beowulf a B+ if it were a term paper.

The McMaster University professor said that while the film is entertaining in its own right, it radically alters the original story. He should know. He wrote a book on it -- the 1998 Beowulf: Gold-Hall and Earth-Dragon: Beowulf as Metaphor -- a well-received scholarly treatise on the Old English epic poem.

"All the characterization and motivation of the plot is entirely changed in the movie," said the professor emeritus of the department of English and cultural studies. "It's a complete reversal to make it into an action film, a sexy, drunken, spirited, noisy epic.

"I had gone to it thinking it would be a travesty in relation to the original poem, everything done in the modern world related to Beowulf tends to be, but it worked in its own right and held together as to what it was meant to be. Whatever they did to the original, it's still a cracking good story that somehow partly survives."

The film is directed by Robert Zemeckis and stars Ray Winstone as Beowulf, as well as Anthony Hopkins, Angelina Jolie and Robin Penn Wright. It is now playing locally at the Encore theatres in Burlington. It is rated 14A. It has been filmed with the same animation performance capture technology Zemeckis used for The Polar Express in which actors are converted into computer images.

Lee, who was president and vice-chancellor of McMaster University from 1980 to 1990, discovered Beowulf as a graduate student at the University of Toronto in 1957 and has spent most of his working life immersed in it. He said he quickly got hooked by the poem, which may be as old as 1,400 years, despite its linguistic challenge of being written in Old English, which bears little or no resemblance to the language spoken today. That can be said of the new movie's resemblance to the original poem. The characters are the same, but the movie turns the story on its ear, taking its heroic themes and turning them to evil and less noble ends.

And that flip-flop centres on the Gold Hall of the poem, on which Lee based the title of his book, changing it from a positive aspect of the story to a place of decadence.

"The initial point in the old poem is an idealized world in which a mighty king (Hrothgar) builds this great Gold Hall to reward his warrior thanes and to experience with them the glory of the hall and their victory over their foes and sharing of treasure," he said.

"It's all very positive and heroic. The film removes all that idealized concept. You start right out with a thoroughly self-indulgent, wildly drunken, fornicating scene that is very vivid and quite engaging for a viewer, but the hall is corrupt and anything but ideal.

"The whole motivation of the story is radically changed and it goes on from there."

Lee said laughingly that students desperate to complete a Beowulf term paper should not rely on the film as a source. "You will be puzzling your professor as to how you got everything so totally wrong."

dfoley@thespec.com

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