The film adaptation that I chose to cover was “Eaters of the Dead” by Michael Crichton and “The 13th Warrior”. The film and story follow Ahmad ibn Fadlan’s adventure with pagan Vikings. These Vikings are told by a volva to take a non-Viking with them or they’ll fail their mission. Conveniently, Fadlan is there to fulfill that role. The plot continues on with battles and the like, and Fadlan returns home happy that he learned to be a man. It’s a really thin plot, but the novel works because of the style used to tell it. Thus, the movie fails on a fundamental level when it changes the style from documentary to a typical fantasy adventure. The adaptation was a traditional translation because the general plot was the same, but dialogue and characters…show more content… It treats the tale like a typical action-adventure story. Modern society has too many examples of these, so Beowulf is left at the wayside. While the novel changes elements of Beowulf to make it different, the movie stays truer to the formula of the original text—battle, battle, dialogue, battle, boasting, final battle, hero dies, burial. Issues of whether Crichton is even telling the tale of Beowulf aside, the movie completely missed the point. The novel was good because it wasn’t conventional. The sound and music in the movie are what one would assume for a Hollywood telling of a Norse tale. There are calling horns, rowing drums, and ambient strings playing for most of the music. The sounds are visceral, swords slashing, bones cracking, etc. In my viewing, I didn’t find anything too spectacular about the sound. It fits the reading. If music were to be added to the text, the film score would work just fine. However, I would have loved Norse vocals included in the film score. Yes, it’s a dead language, but there would have been many experts willing to work with the composer to provide something worthwhile. It’s just another subpar element of the