Beowulf (2007)
February 18th, 2008
Wow! What a good movie.
Although I do sometimes enjoy a comic-book epic type of movie, I was dreading this one, because it’s made in the same way as 300. Real actors are digitized and rendered as computer animations. And 300 was extremely bad.
This is a huge improvement over 300, mostly because the story is so much better. It’s a lot easier to appreciate the graphic technique when you aren’t constantly snickering in disbelief.
The effect is like being inside an extremely well-done video game. Movements are slightly wooden and jerky, and facial expressions aren’t quite right, but the level of detail is far beyond what’s possible in actual cinematography. And the placement of the “camera” is unlimited, because there is no camera. It can be put inside of dragons or on the ground underneath horses’ hooves, and in this movie, it always is.
Plus it’s Beowulf, the first hero epic in the English language, or something like English.
This movie isn’t entirely faithful to the real story. It throws in a central sex theme, in which Beowulf (Ray Winstone) doesn’t actually kill Grendel’s mother. Instead he… well, you know. (He has to. She’s Angelina Jolie, and she wants a son.) After that he’s cursed. The same thing happened to old king Hrothgar (Anthony Hopkins), so Grendel (Crispin Glover) is Hrothgar’s son. (Wait until you see who Beowulf’s son turns out to be.)
I think this is a pretty good angle, and an improvement over the original tale, which is - let’s face it - kind of dull.
Beowulf has character development, thrilling graphics, and a rousing story. What’s not to like? Highly recommended, for an animated swords-and-sandals epic with Vikings and a dragon in it. If you don’t ever like them, you won’t like this one either. But I think it’s a good one.
Last summer I saw Beowulf performed outdoors by actors on stilts. Here is my review.
I get a lot of search-engine hits for ‘Grendel’ and ‘Grendel’s mother’, but I think they’re really looking for pictures of Angelina Jolie. Here is a picture of Grendel as portrayed by an actor on stilts. That’s Beowulf snoozing in the background.
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