July
27
Comic-Con: Beowulf Footage Unveiled
It kills me that I missed Beowulf yesterday--I got in late Thursday night. I'll be posting coverage all weekend from our Variety team:
[Posted by Peter Debruge]
It’s been a long time since high school, so maybe I’m not remembering “Beowulf” correctly, but the footage touted in four separate screenings at Comic-Con this year implies that (a) Grendel is actually the love child of “corrupt” King Hrothgar (Anthony Hopkins) and a “ruthlessly seductive” demon and (b) when sent to kill Grendel’s mother, Beowulf (Ray Winstone, He-Manned up for your viewing pleasure) gets it on with her instead.It doesn’t hurt that she’s played by a very naked Angelina Jolie — or the computer-animated, gold-laminated equivalent of the actress, looking more Lara Croft than ever. Banish the primitive, hairy beasts of the Anglo-Saxon epic from your mind. As reimagined by screenwriters Neil Gaiman and Roger Avary, Grendel’s mother is a “Species”-like shape-shifter, a sex goddess with a serpent’s tail (see the trailer for yourself).
The footage unveiled at Comic-Con is an enigma, delivering photorealistic characters using director Robert Zemeckis’ “Polar Express”-style performance capture technique. The audience at Thursday’s Paramount panel seemed less than impressed, comparing the look to video games and the “Final Fantasy” movie, although a longer 20-minute clip screened in 3-D went over far better with the fans.
During the Q&A following the demo I attended, one impressed journalist volunteered, “The new ‘Star Trek’ would look great in 3-D,” to which Real D chairman-CEO Michael Lewis enigmatically replied, “Stay tuned.” Could J.J. Abrams’ upcoming “Star Trek” prequel be one of the dozen or so yet-to-be-announced 3-D projects Real D has in the works? “Let’s put it this way,” Lewis said, “it would be foolish for any major release not to be considering the possibility.”
Here's LAT's Beowulf takeout. Other responses to Beowulf are on AICN; here's one overheated AICN fanboy response:
The trailer for Robert Zemeckis' CGI-a-riffic BEOWULF is now online.Some of it is "Oh...my...GOD!!!!" breathtaking.
Some of it looks like cut scene fodder still in need of TLC.
ALL of the characters look better than the glassy eyed zombies who populated
POLAR EXPRESS - whose technology was built upon to realize this project.
And, this looks a helluva lot better than that goofy Christopher Lambert
movie we got a few years back. (Duh!)And, when all is said and done, they've CGId an Angelina who (here, at
least) appears every bit as bulge inducing as the real thing. No small
accomplishment there.Click on Angelinabot's svelte, glistening, beckoning hotness to see for
yourself!!!
UPDATE: Sony Pictures Imageworks is developing three perf capture pics: producer Avi Arad's Maximum Ride, the James Patterson series; Neanderthals, a caveman comedy from Jon Favreau of Iron Man fame; and a mystical epic adventure from perf capture innovator Jerome Chen.
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