Beowulf: Movie Review (2007)

12/16/2007 Posted by Admin

The eyes don't have it

Directed by Robert Zemeckis, written by Neil Gaiman and Roger Avery, 111 minutes, rated PG-13.

The new Robert Zemeckis movie "Beowulf" has a great ending — powerful, fiery and exciting. It’s a nice feat of showmanship, the best part of the film. You should know this because what comes before it, with few exceptions, can be long and tedious.

Set in Denmark and based on the 6th century Anglo-Saxon poem, the movie updates it all for the present with hot bods, nudity and sex — apparently, just what the masses ordered. It follows the great warrior Beowulf (Ray Winstone) as he accepts the challenge of a king (Anthony Hopkins) to kill the giant Grendel (Crispin Glover), who is busy wreaking havoc upon the king’s land.

It’s a situation that escalates into Beowulf also battling Grendel’s slinky minx of a mother (Angelina Jolie) and finally their offspring, who has the ability to morph into a fire-breathing dragon. Along the way, Beowulf drinks his share of mead, becomes king, garners the love of a queen (Robin Wright Penn), enjoys a lover on the side, grows a conscience and keeps his rock-solid abs throughout.

So, at the very least, the movie sounds reasonably entertaining, but here’s the thing: The film follows Zemeckis’ 2004 movie, "The Polar Express," in that it uses performance-capture technology to turn its large cast of human actors into something that wavers between human and humanoid.

Achieving photorealism through computer animation is an inevitable progression of the CGI movement, but is photorealism really what audiences want from an animated movie? The recent successes of "Shrek the Third," "Ratatouille " and "Meet the Robinsons" suggest otherwise, but "Beowulf" begs to differ.

What we have here is a movie that renders beautiful interiors and landscapes but which fails to faithfully capture the human form. As such, there are problems with the technology that make for a distracting experience, one the movie struggles to overcome. The characters’ eyes, for instance, are unnervingly without soul, and the way the characters move, while sometimes fluid, is often too mechanized to appear real.

While the character Gollum from the "Lord of the Rings" movies was created using the same performance-capture technology, the effect worked for him because Gollum was a beast who could exist as a creature of the imagination. In the case of "Beowulf," it fails to work because there’s confusion about what Zemeckis is trying to achieve here. If he wanted his computer-animated characters to appear as human as possible, then why didn’t he just scrap the technology and instead go with a live-action movie?

Whatever the case, at this point in the game, somebody needs to tell the director to get his head out of the computer and back into humanity, because "Beowulf," while exciting at the end, is sorely lacking in humanity throughout.

Grade: C-