New Age Beowulf

From yesterday's Guardian:

He is the original action hero, a fearless Norse warrior who slew a murderous troll and helped inspire Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. And he is coming to a multiplex near you.

The race to turn Beowulf, the hero of the first great written English poem, into a box-office star to rival the likes of Aragorn, Achilles and Alexander the Great, has begun. Two films starring the fictional 6th-century sword-slinger are in production.

Well okay. I read Beowulf in high school and enjoyed it enough to grab a copy, during a recent raid of a second-hand bookstore, of Seamus Heaney's translation of this ancient epic. Sounds like a film, or films, I'd be interested in seeing.

Beowulf & Grendel, directed by Sturla Gunnarsson, is a $12m co-production from Britain, Canada and Iceland, starring the Scots actor Gerard Butler. Filmed in Iceland, it is described by its producers as a "spiritual film".

Butler's Beowulf is a complex man who grows to understand and even sympathise with the troll Grendel.

I am a simple man, with simple needs. I do not want to watch a movie about spiritual Vikings. I do not wish my Norse heroes to understand and sympathise with the trolls; I wish them to slay the trolls. Preferably in spectacular fashion.

Andrew Rai Berzins, the Canadian screenwriter for Beowulf & Grendel, cites the implausibility of parts of the story, which was written in Anglo-Saxon by an unknown author sometime between 700 and 1000.

Implausible? A heroic saga featuring trolls and dragons... implausible? Really?

Maybe they picked the wrong source material to work with.