Buckle up for an epic, wild, Old English ride

As every high school senior knows, the eighth-century epic poem "Beowulf" is the oldest extant work of any significance in our (or any other modern European) language, and the point from which we normally date the beginning of English Literature.

Yet, for all its sword-and-sorcery adventure, the movie industry had somehow managed to completely ignore this landmark work until last summer's "Beowulf & Grendel" popped up out of nowhere to be a very faithful celluloid adaptation of the saga.

Now, barely a year later, we have another version of the 3,182 lines of unrhymed alliterative Old English verse, this one infinitely more expensive, computer-animated by Robert Zemeckis and crafted to be a rousing blood-and-guts historical spectacular a la "300."

The film, which opens Thursday in Seattle, strays from the text enough to make the past five generations of high-school English teachers roll over in their graves, and others will be discouraged by its gloomy and often over-the-top animation. But it fills the screen with imaginative action and it moves like a bullet.

The opening is faithful to the poem, telling how brave Beowulf (Ray Winstone) comes to the aid of a Danish king (Anthony Hopkins) whose court is being terrorized and devastated by the nocturnal ravages of a monster, Grendel (Crispin Glover).

After this setup and the first Beowulf-Grendel encounter, the script (co-written by Neil Gaiman) goes its own way, presenting the hero as a flawed braggart and inventing a secret past to the premise that gives the monster an Oedipal motivation.

As it powers along to an entirely different place than the traditional "Beowulf," the atmosphere is gothic, the action is stacked to provide a rising adrenaline rush and the downtime is spiced with suggestions of sex. (Beowulf looks like a Chippendales dancer and fights in the nude, and Angelina Jolie is Grendel's centerfold mom.)

In the process, the human story gets all but lost in the visual razzle-dazzle, Winstone's Beowulf is not half as charismatic a hero as Gerard Butler's was in last year's version, and the mythic element of the story doesn't have a whole lot of impact.

The film's humanity is further distanced by Zemeckis' "performance-capture" technology, which feeds the motions of its cast of real actors (who do their work in special suits, attached to electrodes) into the computer to be manipulated as part of the animation process.

The effect is much more realistic here than it was in Zemeckis' 2004 film "Polar Express," which inaugurated the technology, but it's still somewhat off-putting. The actors all look surreal and slightly grotesque, as if they might be wearing Halloween masks of themselves.

Even so, and even though the film is non-stop beefcake and bloodshed, "Beowulf" fulfills itself as a mesmerizing "trip" movie: a thrilling visit to an alien time and place, devoid of a single dull moment and spiked with something interesting, unexpected or viscerally gripping in virtually every frame.

Besides being an Oscar-winning director ("Forrest Gump"), Zemeckis is also an ace designer of theme-park attractions (Universal City's "Back to the Future" ride) and -- perhaps more than any feature he's done -- this one works as a buckle-up-your-seatbelt, white-knuckle roller-coaster experience.

"Beowulf" is particularly impressive in this respect if you see it in 3-D. Its stereoscopic effects are the best thing about it -- so good that it makes me think this 55-year-old process may at long last be emerging from the gimmick stage and entering the regular vocabulary of film.