Beowulf (16 November 2007)
starring Ray Winstone, Robin Wright Penn, Anthony Hopkins, Crispin Glover, John Malkovich, Brendan Gleeson, Angelina Jolie, Rik Young, Sebastian Roché, Sonje Fortag, Sharisse Baker-Bernard, Charlotte Salt, Julene Renee, Greg Ellis, Leslie Harter Zemeckis, Woody Schultz, Dominic Keating, Tyler Steelman, Shay Duffin, Costas Mandylor, Chris Coppola
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MPAA rating: Studio: ImageMovers, Shangri-La Entertainment Script: Neil Gaiman, Roger Avary Music: Alan Silvestri Running time: 113 minutes Tags: Action; Animation; castles; demons; dragons; Drama; Epic; Geats; mead; monsters; races; swords; thanes Tactical strength: [4/10]
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for intense sequences of violence including disturbing images, some sexual material and nudity
I know I saw several trailers for Beowulf in theaters. Somehow until I rented the DVD, I missed the fact that Zemeckis decided to make an entirely digital (i.e., cartoon) production instead of using live action. While I think digital animation has it's place, I think the medium works better for fully animated features like The Incredibles rather than using real actors to create wire frames that end up looking like the same actor with way too much makeup. Much older movies like Zemeckis's The Polar Express did a better job at creating human action from sampled actors, so I have to conclude that Zemeckis wanted his film to look like plastic action figures came to life and enacted a version of the Beowulf legend.
The low quality animation made me feel like I was watching a cut scene from a video game. For the entire film, I kept getting the feeling that at any moment the cut scene would end, and I would have to take up the game controller to battle the monsters. Much of the computer rendering of human action looked stiff and unrealistic. As the thanes of Hrothgar (Anthony Hopkins) celebrate in the mead hall, much of the background action looks awkward. If I could come up with a stylistic reason for shoddy animation, I might go lighter with my criticism. Unfortunately, Beowulf looks like a production made with pre-Toy Story technology. In several places, Grendel (Crispin Glover) flings human bodies about Hrothgar's mead hall. Even the lambasted Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow has better computer generated scenes. Often the bodies in Beowulf would fall too slowly or react unrealistically as the body comes to a terminal stop against a support post or wall. (And why would a mead hall built exclusively for getting the entire populace drunk have so many spikes available for the impaling of human bodies?)
Some of the gore in the Grendel attack scene did get quite explicit: bodies torn in half, bodies flung and impaled on spikes, heads bitten off live men and eaten. Displaying such gore on real instead of cartoon humans might have lead to an MPAA rating of R. So the cartoon violence might have purposely kept the rating down to a PG-13. Ok, use a animated format, but at least get the budget to render the scenes with realistic human motion and falling-body physics.
In case you didn't have to read the epic, Old English, poem Beowulf in high-school, I'll summarize the plot events. Beowulf, the hero, hears of Hrothgar's problem with Grendel crashing his mead-hall parties. In the text, you have to read a long summary of Beowulf's qualifications for defeating Grendel, such as winning a swimming race against the ocean god. Beowulf easily defeats Grendel. The next night, Grendel's mother comes out for revenge, and Beowulf tracks her to her lair. In the lair, Beowulf defeats Grendel's mother, receiving the praise of Hrothgar. Beowulf returns home, becomes king of the Geats, and as an old man must battle a dragon that has attacked his kingdom. Beowulf kills the dragon, but receives a fatal wound. In his last moments, Beowulf names Wiglaf as the successor to the kingdom because only Wiglaf stayed to fight the dragon with Beowulf. Funerals play a big part of the Beowulf text, and Beowulf gets buried in a mound with all the dragon's hoard.
Zemeckis's film starts out following the plot of the text quite closely, but for some reason, the scriptwriters decided they needed to add a sexual element to the story. So, the film has both Hrothgar and Beowulf (Ray Winstone) sleep with the demon, Grendel's mother (Angelina Jolie). Sleeping with the demon seems to always produce progeny and render the man sterile. In Zemekis's version, Hrothgar's tryst with the demon produces the hideous monster Grendel. When Beowulf goes to kill Grendel's mother, he falls for her seduction and fails to kill her. Hrothgar names Beowulf his successor and then kills himself by jumping out a castle window. As king, Beowulf has the temporary protection of the demon -- at least until Beowulf's son by the demon has matured. The union of Beowulf and the demon produces a golden dragon. The dragon attacks Beowulf's kingdom, and Beowulf dies killing the dragon. Grendel's mother manages to survive and she appears to envelop Beowulf's body on his burning funeral boat.
I could engage in a literary discussion about the symbolism of the two children of the demon. Hrothgar produces a demon, and Beowulf produces a golden man that can transform into a dragon. Clearly, Beowulf's golden son implies that he has greater purity than Hrothgar, but then why do both succumb to the demon's seductions? This discussion could go on at length, but since the movie took so little care with the visual aspects of the film, I have a hard time believing that any symbolism appears by anything but pure chance.
Since you can't blame an actor for a bad wireframe, I have a hard time saying things like, Anthony Hopkins makes a great Hrothgar. Hopkins does a great voice for the Hrothgar cartoon character. Unfortunately, the computer rendering of the king merely resembles Hopkins, and you can't say that Hopkins did a great job portraying Hrothgar. And the same goes for the rest of the characters. With bad animation and addition of the sexual material to the original story line, I don't see much about Beowulf to recommend. The pacing of the plot does flow very well, and if fully animated or filmed as live action, Beowulf might really have made a lasting impact. And at least when they make the Beowulf video game, they won't have to spend any money on the cut scenes.
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