Excerpted from the Plugged In Online Movie Review

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Before English teachers everywhere rush their students off to the theater to soak up this latest incarnation of a literary giant, there are three things to say:

1) The film has very little to do with the book. For one thing, the poem's Christian overlay (Beowulf often credits God for his heroic exploits) is all but replaced by backhanded slaps at Christianity onscreen.

In the book, Grendel and his Mother are said to be offspring of Cain, who was cursed by God as recorded in Genesis. That's not in the movie. And Beowulf doesn't "lay" with Grendel's mother in the original, either. Instead, he slays her with a sword made by a race of giants—wiped out, apparently, in the Flood.

And when Beowulf confronts the dragon, in the book, he's confronting his own mortality in a particularly splashy way—not his own misbegotten son. So anyone who uses this film as a sort of Cliffs Notes is bound to get all the questions wrong on the semester test.

2) Beowulf does say some interesting things about sin and temptation, despite its obstinate overlooking of the poem's overall character. "Many of the themes that are in Beowulf were lifted from the Bible—a heroic man's journey, the fight between good and evil and the price of glory," says director Robert Zemeckis (The Polar Express, Cast Away). Hrothgar, for instance, wallows in a world of sensual gratification and therefore breeds a creature who's plagued by his own hyper-developed senses. Beowulf is boastful, and his "son" is all balled up arrogance and anger draped in a dragon's skin.

Beowulf, the hero, says that in the wake of Christianity, "We men are the monsters now." In Christian teaching, there are indeed monsters without and monsters within. "Filthy rags," the prophet Isaiah calls the best of what we are. And it's Grendel's mother who becomes the temptation that brings these sinful characteristics to horrifying life. So, despite the film's apparent exoskeleton of paganism, it ends with the Christ-like sacrifice Beowulf must make and the idea that he must show incredible courage to confront his own, monstrous mistake.

3) The nudity and violence in Beowulf is such that, had this been a live-action film, the Motion Picture Association of America would've undoubtedly slapped it with an R rating. This may be an animated film—the rationale surely used to justify its PG-13 status—but everything is so realistic it feels like Zemeckis got off on a technicality. Even star Angelina Jolie says she won't take her own children to the film because of its content. "It's remarkable it has the rating it has," she told the BBC. "It's quite an extraordinary film, and some of it shocked me."

A fourth point is therefore not needed. And class is now dismissed.