“What We Need is a Hero”: Beowulf in a Post-9/11 World ALISON GULLEY W HEN THE 2007 ROBERT ZEMECKIS FILM BEOWULF DEBUTED, IT was met with lukewarm responses from professional film critics and somewhat more favorable online reviews from amateur critics. Most reviewers focused on what they considered the less-than-successful “performance-capture” computer animation and thrilling 3-D effects, which hurl blood, guts, spears, mead cups, and Angelina Jolie’s breasts at the audience. Typical of these was Peter Rainer of the Christian Science Monitor who stated that “Zemeckis has converted the epic poem about the warrior who slays the monster Grendel into a species of computer game.” Few made more than a nod toward the movie as an adaptation of a classic literary work. Richard Corliss of Time confessed that he did not even have a memory of sleeping through Beowulf in high school, and advised: “You want to read Beowulf? Get the book, I’m not stopping you.” So, while many critics talked about what Beowulf looked like, very few talked about what it meant. But two reviewers, one a medievalist and one a theologian, are interested in what this particular rendition of Beowulf means. In an article aptly named, “Never Mind Grendel: Can Beowulf Conquer the Twenty-first Century Guilt Trip?” Stephen T. Asma notes that Zemeckis has provided a twenty-first century Beowulf and Grendel: “Zemeckis’s more tender-minded film version suggests that the people who cast out Grendel are the real monsters. The monster, according to this charity paradigm, is just misunderstood rather than evil. The blame for Grendel’s violence is shifted to the humans, who sinned against him earlier and brought the vengeance upon themselves” The Journal of Popular Culture, Vol. 47, No. 4, 2014 © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. 800