Beowulf
By Jason Revill
When King Hrothgar (Anthony Hopkins) finds his kingdom terrorized by the creature Grendel (Crispin Glover), he sends word looking for a hero to help. From across the see comes Beowulf (Ray Winstone) and his loyal warriors. They stay the night in Hrothgar’s Hall and when Grendel shows up, Beowulf rips his arm off, killing the monster but not before he drags himself to his mother’s lair and tells her what happened. In revenge, Grendel’s mother (Angelina Jolie) comes and kills Beowulf’s men, forcing him to track her down to stop the violence once and for all. Unfortunately, once he finds her, he also finds that there are other secrets in Hrothgar’s kingdom that have haunted it for generations.
The voice work for the cast is all round pretty good, but there are occasions, particularly with Robin Wright Penn and John Malkovich, where the animation undercuts the acting. Malkovich is just such an unusual persona that trying to recreate him is inevitably doomed to fail. Ray Winstone, however, is the exact opposite. With a voice that is perfect for Beowulf and the benefit of a computer generated set of abs he makes a great hero. Anthony Hopkins and Breenden Gleeson are both such reliable actors in general that no matter what format you put them in they are going to excel in it. Ironically, the most marketed aspect of this film, Angelina Jolie, is probably the weakest link and as sultry as her voice is, let’s face it, this is just an excuse to map her body for generations to come.
Robert Zemeckis first made use of motion capture technology in The Polar Express and while he may be more enamored of it than the general audience is, this second attempt to recreate human actors is far more life-like than the first. The technology isn’t perfect and while most of the film is visually incredible, there are times that the emotional impact is lost on a fact that the animation can’t fully realize the subtlety of human emotion. The effect is that the audience is chugging along at a good clip in the middle of a ultra violent action scene, but is drawn out by quiet moments of dialog that inevitably follow.
Like most people, when I saw the trailer for the first time, my first reaction was confusion over whether or not what I was seeing was computer generated. I couldn’t for the life of me settle on the reason why anyone would go through the trouble of digitally recreating Angelina Jolie, when you have a perfectly good one right there. I wondered why Zemeckis didn’t implore the green screen techniques of 300, but now I know. For all the flaws of motion capture, it does provide a level of scale that 300 didn’t have. The Spartans in that film seemed like intruders in a computer generated world. Well, that and the live action actors in 300 didn’t have the rage of emotion the computer generated ones do in Beowulf.
Don’t expect to get much out of having previously read the epic poem in your English class, pretty much the only similarities between this film and it are that they’re both about a guy named Beowulf. However, the motion capture allows for wildly exciting and gruesome scenes that had they been live action would have surely earned the film an R rating. Perhaps if they had marketed Beowulf in that manner rather than with the partially nude image of Angelina Jolie, there would have been at least one woman in the screening I was in and a smaller amount of guys in sweatpants.
The Grade
- Story: B-
- Acting: B-
- Visuals: B
- Originality: B
- Enjoyability: B
- Overall: B-
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