A 6th-century Scandinavian warrior named Beowulf embarks on a mission to slay the man-like ogre, Grendel.
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Reviews
tmdb28039023
1
By tmdb28039023
Beowulf hasn't aged well; it looked like crap when it was released in 2007, and it looks like old crap 15 years later. This movie plays like someone made a videogame based (loosely, natch) on the epic poem, then took all the cutscenes out and edited them together into feature length. Now, if only Beowulf came with an option to skip the cutscenes.
The film features human characters animated using live action motion capture animation, but I fail to see why they even bothered. Five years after The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, which was the first feature film to utilize a real-time motion capture system, the novelty should have surely worn off; moreover, this technology hasn't aged any more gracefully than Beowulf has, and even today the best motion capture in the world can't make a silk purse out of the sow's ear that is even the best computer-generated imagery in the world – in fact, putting the two together is just piling crap on top of crap.
It's too bad, because a good live-action film could be made with Anthony Hopkins, John Malkovich, and Ray Winstone – though not a good live-action Beowulf film, mind you, because it would still go the CGI route for Grendel and the dragon and who knows what else; a fully animated movie would at least be consistent, or in this case consistently crappy.
Not that consistency is something of which one could accuse Beowulf; some characters look vaguely like the actors who provide their motions and voices (namely Hopkins), while others not at all (Malkovich) – and there there's Winstone, who looks for all the world like a poorly-rendered digital version of Sean Bean.
GenerationofSwine
1
By GenerationofSwine
It was just too much...but to be fair I saw it in 3D. The none 3D version may have actually been better, but honestly I have no way of knowing.
At first it was, well, it was wow. I had never actually seen anything in 3D, being far too young for for the first round of popular 3D movies to hit the theater, but my father assured me it was nothing compared to this...
He also assured me it didn't make him as nauseous, and sometimes I can see where he's coming from on that point.
It came out right in the first wave of the new 3D, right when 3D was becoming popular again and actually worth it.
And it was jaw dropping even if some of the motion made my old man sick.
But it was also too much. A new technology and one that was a spectacular in itself, but not exactly tested to perfection.
It seemed like a 14 year-old girl putting on make-up and not yet understanding that less is more.
Less than half an hour into it, I had no idea what was going on, the 3D was too distracting to even attempt to follow the plot.
About an hour into it, the 3D got boring, and yes, still over-the-top distracting.
By the time I left I had the feeling that I had just experienced something that I had never experienced before. I had the feeling that watching a movie on the big screen would never be the same again...but I still couldn't figure out if I saw a movie or not.
