Baraka_Guru: don't get me wrong, I generally agree with your assessment of what's wrong with a lot of movies today, and I certainly don't think this Beowulf movie is anything deserving of awards, but I'm not sure how Hollywood's tendency to place spectacle over story has anything to do with how generally one-dimensional the original Beowulf story is. Beowulf is interesting as a poetic relic from the past, but it doesn't honestly hold up that well against either newer hero stories or even older hero stories. As
Val_1 pointed out, many of the Greek characters were complex and interesting. Beowulf is...Beowulf. He's an awesome hero who, in the poem, does nothing other than be awesome. Then he dies, while being awesome and old. The movie, while not excellent, certainly made the story far more interesting and meaningful than the poem. That says nothing of whether or not the script was written well, or whether the choice to use CGI was a good one.