Beowulf - 'Episode 1'

Lady Blacksmith, Dead Stuntcasting, Sir Not Appearing in Episode 1, Beowulf, Thoroughly Modern Millie, Cheeky McSidekick, Prince Sneerface and the Queen

As the opening credits of Beowulf : Return to the Shieldlands begin and animated gripping beasts crawl across stylised Viking artwork, one thing is clear: This series really wants to be Game of Thrones.

Young Beowulf puts an axe in a troll's head after it kills his father, and is adopted by Hrothgar, King of Heorot (pronounced 'Eret', apparently.) Years later, after being banished for reasons which remain obscure for almost the entire episode (he didn't get on with his less capable foster brother Prince Sneerface and the Queen clearly knew that he was actually Hrothgar's son,) he returns to pay his last respects to the dead king. There's a fight and we meet the Queen, grown up Prince Sneerface and his healer girlfriend Thoroughly Modern Millie*. The Queen is, it turns out, now the Thane of Heorot, part of a sweeping tide of feminism which also sees a female blacksmith and TMM as the chief healer.

While Beowulf's rogue Cheeky McSidekick marries the blacksmith's mum so that... All right, I'm not sure on this one. It might just be to annoy the blacksmith. He doesn't seem set on settling down at all. Anyway, while that is going on, Beowulf find the Reeve murdered, apparently by a mudborn - a sort of goblin-ape - which runs off chasing TMM while Prince Sneerface is busy arresting Beowulf for murder. Cheeky McSidekick interrupts the execution and they hare off to rescue TMM, although the mudborn isn't trying to hurt her, instead saving her from a barghest (a hybrid of wolf and CGI) and seemingly trying for some King Kong action.) It gets in a fight with Beowulf and loses half a hand.

Back at the ranch, TMM goes all CSI Heorot and discovers that the Reeve was actually stabbed, and apparently using a weapon with a round profile, which honestly ought to be pretty easy to track down in nth century Denmark**. You'd think someone might have checked that before condemning the man with only flat-bladed weapons.

Beowulf: Return to the Shieldlands is not desperately bad - by which I mean it's a lot better than, say, Olympus, more or less the definition of damning with faint praise - but it's not anything resembling good. The acting is decent, the plot has a few twists, and the fights are okay - when the camera isn't juddering with each impact, which could really get old - but there's nothing much to distinguish it and on the whole it's - so far - pretty standard and predictable fare. It really, really wants to be Game of Thrones, but in many ways represents everything that Game of Thrones is a reaction to, from intrusively modern sensibilities to the small, core cast and straightforward plotting.

* So, obviously the names haven't impacted on me in this thing, and healer chick is the ridiculously liberal one speaking the modern sensibilities.
** The blurb says Britain, and since Beowulf clearly isn't a Geat I can't swear that Heorot hasn't moved.

The Eagle

Hannah and I decided to watch a DVD on Friday, and after considerable searching, we settled on The Matrix, simply because I don't own many DVDs that she was interested in. It's not that our tastes don't overlap, they do, I just don't own those DVDs. Thus, on Saturday we opted to pick up a cheap DVD in Asda for a future evening's entertainment (in the end, Sunday's).

After much careful consideration, we opted to spend £3 on a copy of The Eagle, with Channing Tatum and Jamie Bell, rather than Black Death, with Sean Bean.

Based on Rosemary Sutcliffe's The Eagle of the Ninth and referenced by James Holloway of the Gonzo History Project in his discussion of Picts who look like Native Americans, The Eagle is an odd-couple buddy movie, in which Marcus - son of the last Centurion of the lost 9th Hispania - seeks to restore the honour of his family by recovering the eagle standard of the legion, aided by his British slave, Esca.

This is one of those films where they distinguish nationality by accent, having the Romans chiefly played by Americans - or in one case, Mark Strong doing an accent, which is a bit odd - and the British by British actors. Marcus and Esca argue and talk about whether Rome is awesome or awful; they get captured by the Picts and Esca claims Marcus is his slave, then at the end of the film they basically swan into town hall, give a Tribune the finger and swan out again like they're in a cop movie and they just took down the mob.

It's kind of interesting to watch from that angle.