Headscratchers / Beowulf (2007)

• Grendel's mother says that humans "... have slain so many of (our) kind", referring to demons. However Grendel's mother killed over a dozen armed and armored people single-handedly in less than one night as revenge for Grendel's death and when Beowulf confronted Grendel's mother in her lair, his sword had no effect on her, tying into the poem where she's immune to weapons made by human hands. Going by this she is obviously very dangerous herself. So how exactly are humans a threat to her and how did we slay so many of her kind? It's likely given what she is and her nature that she is either an Unreliable Narrator or she's lying to Grendel.
  • Moral Myopia.
  • They don't all have the same abilities. And the sword passing through her could have been because she wasn't really standing there, it was a hologram.
  • The implication seems to be that she can be killed and is trying her damndest to stay under the radar so that mankind doesn't dedicate a significant effort to doing so. After all, those 20 people she killed were all drunk or sleeping when it happened.
• When Beowulf said "The age of heroes is dead. The Christ-god killed it." What does that even mean? Apart from some potential Writer on Board, it doesn't make sense in the film's context. The disappearance of demons would be a good thing, and the heroes seemed to be already in decline with Hrothgar fathering Grendel and Beowulf fathering the dragon before Christianity arrived on the scene. The film's only openly Christian character, Unferth, was a jerk at first, however he's treated as a Jerkass Has a Point given his and Wiglaf's shared skepticism of Beowulf's tales (and how the film itself has a critical subtext towards them) and when he thinks Beowulf is a hero he apologizes for his rudeness, gives Beowulf a treasured family heirloom and treats him courteously from then on.
  • The Christ God killing the age of heroes is basically a metaphor for how Christians changed the source material of Beowulf effectively killing it by separating the story from its pagan roots and making it lose some of its intended meanings along the way.
  • The old gods valued combat and fighting and glory, heroic deaths and such. The Christ God doesn't — instead favoring charity, selflessness, peace, etc. It's as simple as that.
• Given that sending a man to kill Grendel's mother always simply results in another Grendel, couldn't Hrothgar just send an all-female kill team after her and be done with it?
  • The simple explanation is that no such team exists to be sent. The Danes in the movie seem to be very patriarchal (Beowulf tells Ursula she must bear a son for her man), so it's possible they don't have warrior women to begin with.
    • And besides, for all we know Grendel's mother is impossible to kill or is at least so powerful that no one save Heroes like Beowulf could do so. She's never in any danger once in the film, despite her fears about angering the humans. If you send a crack team of lady assassins to take her out, she simply has no reason to hold back.