Come For Naked Jolie, Stay For The Story

I finally got to watch Beowulf now that it's out on DVD. I figured since the screen play had been written in part by Neil Gaiman that it at least had the potential to be pretty good. I'm really not sure what I was expecting since the previews kept showing that "I...am...Beowulf!" scene, which seemed incredibly reminiscent of the "This...is...Sparta!" from 300. I can safely say it's nothing really like 300 at all. Sure there's a couple mega fight scene as Beowulf the destroyer of monsters destroys..., well monsters.

Everything is CGI, but done using a combination of motion capture with more traditional animation techniques so it ends up looking incredibly photo realistic, but minor movement animations that are ever so slightly off break any illusion of reality. I'm not sure CGI is to the point where it can do true photo realism yet, mainly because it ends up hurting your brain as you look at it and it appears to be real, but the characters movements aren't quite realistic enough or are distorted from reality just enough that your brain is constantly at odds trying to come to grips with whether what you're seeing is real or fabricated. And as you get sucked into it being realistic there will be that slight misstep or movement that abruptly erases the suspension of disbelief you just achieved and effectively accosts you with the fact that what you're watching isn't real. The constant back and forth is jarring to the senses and distracts a bit from the movie in my opinion. In my mind this is probably why movies with non human CGI do so much better, because your brain can accept their impossible movements by placing it firmly in the realm of the impossible and thereby not causing a sensory conflict in the viewers. Frankly since the movie had a production budget of 150 million I'm not sure why they didn't just do a live action film with CGI enhancements. Maybe it would have been too hard to obscure the various naughty parts if they had done that.

All that said, the motion capture suit on Angelia must have been completely skin tight. There's always some gold water covering her naughty parts, but it doesn't leave a lot to the imagination. As for the story itself it is a reinterpretation of the classic story. It veers away from the traditional version of Beowulf's story and adds in some aspects that I found almost too humanizing. I liked it in that Beowulf is larger than life hero, but at the same time a tragically flawed individual. Typically iconic mythological stories are suppose about to be about heroes that are larger than life and morally unambiguous or they're suppose to show the perils of not staying morally righteous (where morally righteous is usually defined as the mores of the time period when the first story appears). This version of Beowulf tries to have it both ways with a larger than life hero that is also severely flawed. It makes for an interesting story. There have been some people that say the story itself is somehow an attack on Christianity, but I didn't see that myself. Overall I don't think this version of the story will stand the test of the time like the original version has, but it was entertaining enough for one viewing.