The film of “Beowulf,” packed with grandiose special effects and awash with deluges of digital blood, somehow misses the tone of one of the scariest scenes in world literature. We’re quoting from Seamus Heaney’s splendid translation of the Old English epic published in 1999.

In off the moors, down through the mist bands

God-cursed Grendel came greedily loping.

The bane of the race of men roamed forth,

hunting for a prey in the high hall.

Under the cloud-murk he moved towards it,

until it shone above him, a sheer keep

of fortified gold.

The monster, more monstrous because of his humanoid form — and “greedily loping” is perfect — reaches the great hall of Hrothgar, king of the Danes.

Then his rage boiled over, he ripped open

the mouth of the building, maddening for blood,

pacing the length of the patterned floor

with his loathsome tread, while a baleful light,

flame more than light, flared from his eyes.

It’s the flame in Grendel’s eyes that transfixes us, a malevolent blaze that, as the poet implies, seems to project awful sentience beyond mere light.

In transferring “Beowulf” to the screen, director Robert Zemeckis and his staff of animators produced an unwieldy hybrid of fantasy movie and video game, while his writers, far from  creating “a ‘Beowulf’ for our time,” as reviewers on amazon.com keep trumpeting, fashioned a completely different construct burdered and subverted by contemporary psychological motivations, explanations and subplots.

The story of the poem is simple: The mead hall of Hrothgar is visited nightly by the monster Grendel, who ravages the place and kills the king’s warriors with impunity. Beowulf, a young hero from southern Sweden, home of his tribe, the Geats, arrives at Hrothgar’s domain to battle Grendel and kill him; he seeks nothing more than fame and glory. He kills Grendel, but the monster’s mother, wracked with grief and fury, visits the hall, kills several men and escapes to her swampy den. Beowulf follows and kills her too. Hrothgar bestows many thanks and much treasure upon Beowulf, and the hero returns to his homeland. He rules the Geats for 50 years, but a dragon, roused by a thief, begins to ravage the countryside. Beowulf, though aged, feels responsible for his people, and donning armor once more, goes to battle. He kills the dragon but is mortally wounded in turn. He is given a funeral befitting a king and hero, and the poem ends on a somber note of foreboding. 

The movie is content with little of that. In the poem, Grendel’s raids on Hrothgar’s hall occur because he, one of the generations of the spawn of the outlaw Cain, cannot bear to hear the sounds of human singing and joy; in the movie, it’s because his eardrums are outside his head. The movie establishes a complicated network of relationships completely absent from the epic poem. Grendel, we come to understand pretty early in the film, is the son of Hrothgar, who was unable to resist the blandishments of the beautiful sea-demon, aka Angelina Jolie. And when Beowulf goes to kill Grendel’s mother, she seduces him too; their child takes the form of the dragon that Beowulf slays years later.  Of course to make certain all this occurs, Beowulf has to stick around Denmark, so in the movie Hrothgar doesn’t merely bestow praise and booty on Beowulf, he gives him his kingdom and his beautiful young wife and then leaps to his death from a high window. I mean it sounds like a play by Eugene O’Neill.

Conceived in such a manner, as a combination of soap opera and burlesque, the film cannot hope to capture the most important aspects of “Beowulf,” its epic dignity and pervasive sense of fatality. The passages in which the elderly Beowulf, accompanied by his faithful thane Wiglaf, goes to confront the dragon and meet his demise are among the most moving in English poetry; after Beowulf’s departure, his people lament not only his passing, but the end of the Geats themselves in a denouement of invasion, slavery and death.   

On the other hand, while I think this movie fails on many levels — and this animation process still looks hokey — in terms of what it strives for, the best elements are Grendel and Grendel’s mother. As brought to life (or whatever) by Crispin Glover, Grendel is a hideous, rampaging but all-too-human monster filled with rage, self-pity and sorrow. And as his mother, Angelina Jolie, no “tarn-hag,” is, well, Angelina Jolie, here lavishly embodied to the nth degree, poised, bewitching, ravishing, dangerous and overwhelming.  When she whispers to Beowulf, in her underground lair, “So, you have come to see me, Beowulf, Bee-Wolf, Bear,” you can’t help thinking — or I couldn’t — “Gosh, I wish my name were Beowulf.”