This is really my favorite film of the famous Anglo-Saxon epic. Others, like 13th Warrior are pretty damn good, but nothing beats this production from Iceland! Admittedly I have not seen the Zemeckis' version, but I don't at all care for his animation, so I can't imagine that since I didn't care for his Christmas Carol, that I would find much to get excited about in his Beowulf.
Of course the pagan element here is the dying out of the old Norse religion. I like the way that Icelandic director Sturla Gunnarsson deals with the fact that the written account of the Beowulf epic was written down by Christian monks and, therefore, has a Christian bent to it. He has the end of Viking era marked by the breaking down of traditional kingdoms and some social customs, marking the beginning of the Saxon, Angle and Jute migrations southward into Romanized celtic lands in the British Isles. To explain the Christian part of the tale, he has a lone and crazy Christian Irish monk, show up in Daneland raving about this new religion and baptizing any Dane he can lay his hands on (when he's not have fits and seizures that is). The supernatural tale of trolls and sea monsters is presented as part of the natural world, things that have to be dealt with the same as dealing with storms at sea, crop failure on land, or the winter months when food is scarce.
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