Beowulf is good cheesy fun. Bob Zemeckis and Sony Imageworks and the hundreds of folks who labored to make this movie have delivered a must-see event, especially in IMAX 3-D. But it's not nearly as good as it could have been, nor did it need to be so labor intensive. I would happily watch the blue-screen/live-action/300 version of this movie, which would have cost half as much. Or I would eagerly see the entirely animated version. Why not shoot live-action and animate the non-human creatures? This performance capture/imagemotion process remains clunky and stiff.
Here's the deal: the best stuff in Beowulf is the most stylized, the most liberated from the motion-capture process--Angelina Jolie's spike-heeled demon, the monster Grendel, the golden dragon and Beowulf himself. Beowulf is an idealized Adonis-version of Ray Winstone, and the most magnificently rendered human character ever put on-screen. But the other humans, from Robin Wright Penn to Anthony Hopkins, with their plastic eyes and murky teeth, are still strange and weird. They are stiff, robotic, less human than if they had been animated. The human eye is rigged to pick out anything wrong. The closer to reality you get, the easier it is to miss it.
As for the whole Academy debate about animation vs. visual effects, Zemeckis remains hung up on being taken seriously as a live-action director who works with actors and props etc. Well, as long as this movie is 100% rendered, the Academy considers it animation, even if the process used to make the movie is the same one that created Gollum or King Kong. Those characters are considered VFX. But the VFX committee will never budge on this.
The Beowulf myth is a deep and powerful one; it goes back to the old tales that J.R.R. Tolkein was inspired by when he wrote The Lord of the Rings. I highly recommend the Seamus Heaney translation, which doesn't take long to read. But Roger Avary and Neil Gaiman have gussied up the story, complicating it with sex and honor and guilt and all sorts of modern emotions that the original myth had nothing to do with. Finally, I prefer the old-fashioned action-adventure Beowulf & Grendel, starring 300's Gerard Butler.
Here's the Variety review.
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