One thing that I forgot to mention in my previous blogs about Beowulf is that I liked the foreshadowing within the story when Beowulf is warned about his strengths, and to not get carried away because death eventually awaits him too. This brings us to the end of the story when Beowulf wins the battle against the dragon but dies anyway, just like he was told. At the time I did not see the relevance of the warning about his death, but when the story ended I totally got it.
So far I love the movie we are watching and I am almost ashamed that I did not watch it before this class. I love the correlation between the story and the movie. I read that The 13th Warrior is based on a novel “Eaters of the Dead” by Michael Crichton. Does this mean that Crichton based his novel on the story of Beowulf or is it just a big coincidence? I would love to read the novel and see how it compares to the actual story, not to mention the fact that it has an awesome title!
One of my favorite parts of the movie was when Ahmad was fighting against the beasts and when he realized that they were humans he got the confidence and became almost fearless. I think that I would be the same way because there is just something extra freaky and intimidating about the fact that you are fighting an animal or a demon because that battle seems almost impossible to win. However, if you know that it’s a human and that there is somewhat of an equal chance of winning, that’s when you become more confident.
I must admit that at the beginning of the movie when everybody was at the king’s funeral, I thought that they were speaking some random language, yet I couldn’t grasp on what language it was. Not until later did I realize and finally remembered that it’s actually English. How embarrassing!! As much as I like the 13th Warrior, I think that Beowulf is way cooler because he actually fought real demons (not fake monsters) and he did it bare-handed, while the warriors in the movie used weapons. I like the wooden gate or wall that they built to prepare for the second battle and this is somewhat of what I had in mind when I said that I wish Beowulf would have prepared better and thought of a plan before he fought the dragon. I wasn't thinking of weapons but something more like a strategy of how to surround and attack the dragon. If anything he could have accepted the help from his warriors knowing that he is not as strong as he used to be as a 20 year old (even if they were scared they still would've had to fight with him if he ordered that). The wooden gate in the movie was very clever because if it wasn’t for the gate, I am sure the battle would have been twice as hard because the enemy wouldn’t have any obstacles.
I am looking forward to watching the second part of The 13th Warrior and seeing how the correlation between the movie and the story develops. Not to mention that it’s way more interesting to watch than Matrix. Just saying!!
It was interesting to see Ahmed's realization that the Wendols were actually cannibals. It was disgusting to find out that these beings would eat the human heads. I could imagine them just sucking on the eye sockets or something. Sorry gross image. The movie is interesting and it puts another perspective towards Beowulf.
ReplyDeleteEven though we assume they are cannibals, it is really never spelled out in the movie. We see all the skulls at the big version of the small figurine that Ahmed had found after the battle, but they seemed to be in a decorative pattern. It might be spelled out a little clearer in Crichton's novel. There is probably only so much you can do when you are trying to find the widest audience to spend money on your film, but I didn't miss watching the Wendols chow down on some of the guys they killed.
ReplyDeleteActually, Vesna, I think they were speaking Icelandic though I'm not 100% sure. What I thought was fun is the guy that was translating was actually speaking Latin. So, we had Icelandic going through Latin into Arabic (though we heard it as English, Ahmad would have been speaking Arabic).
ReplyDeleteThe novel is pretty interesting and more detailed than the film. I think it's worth a read.