Review: Beowulf (in 3-D!)

Things I never expected to see in a major motion picture:

• Angelina Jolie reprising her Alexander role in full: snaky visual motif, unplaceable Dracula's daughter accent, and birth mother to killing machine.
• Ray Winstone with Brad Pitt's body.
• A lengthy animated fight scene wherein the hero is stark naked.
• A dragon battle that's actually thrilling (the movies have never been able to do dragons well --this one made me believe that a film version of Naomi Novik's Temeraire series is a good idea)
• A 'hide the salami' scene that's almost as funny as the famous nude Austin Powers sequence
• Crispin Glover all sympathetic instead of just freaky

And yet, there they were, all of these improbable things in one place: Robert Zemeckis' gargantuan gothic and goofy motion capture spectacle Beowulf.

Beowulf, which has been loosely adapted from the famously ancient epic poem, tells the story of a cursed kingdom devastated by a monster called Grendel and the hero (Beowulf) who saves the kingdom for a time before new terrors emerge. Zemeckis and his screenwriters Neil Gaiman (the acclaimed fantasy novelist) and Roger Avary (of Pulp Fiction fame) have fleshed out the plot and though I’d hate to call this very mainstream film a “brave” one, they do take welcome chances with their tale, allowing some ambiguity in. Take the third major action set piece, for a good example. Beowulf (Ray Winstone - body fat + rippling musculature) strips down naked to face the beast Grendel (Crispin Glover, with gruesome inside-out looking flesh). The audience is anxious to see what Beowulf can do but there’s a twinge of sadness when you realize that he will actually win. Grendel is a monstrosity but you feel for him. His inevitable defeat seems cruel rather than heroic. How is it that the hero can suddenly seem like such an arrogant bully when we were rooting for him just seconds before? That’s not a common beat in epic fantasy.  

After that sequence larger more powerful creatures await Beowulf in battle, including the aforementioned reptilian Angelina Jolie and an enormous dragon. But narrative is not really the issue here. Beowulf lives and dies by its visuals. They both thrill and disturb, though not always in the right ways. Zemeckis and his team of visual effects sorcerers have advanced motion capture technology (we last saw it in Monster House) significantly but to what end? Some of the 3-D effects are breathtaking. The final dragon fight climax is stunningly choreographed –you can actually understand what’s happening in an action scene: imagine it! But not all of the film works that well. Many of the 3D effects and more baroque moments are just plain cheese-tacular. Additionally there’s the nagging issue of photorealism. Only Ray Winstone seems to have been cast for his performance. The rest of the characters are visualized in such a way that the animators are clearly trying to show you the familiar actors faces. But the expressiveness of the human face remains beyond the reach of CGI. Unless faces are stylized (see the wondrous performances within The Incredibles) this sort of animation makes people feel vacant and dead eyed: John Malkovich, Anthony Hopkins, Robin Wright Penn and Alison Lohman are like reanimated zombies who’ve had too much “beautifying” plastic surgery. (Angelina Jolie is free from this problem: she’s already a cartoon.)

Like 300 earlier in the year Beowulf is targeted at fans of violent sword and sorcery fare. It’s free of that films weirdly homophobic homoeroticism opting instead for plain old eroticism. The camera ogles Beowulf’s musculature and backside in myriad positions (it’s an action movie) and later delights in Angelina Jolie’s reptilian sex goddess moves. Though she has no visible nipples or genitalia, she’s all woman. Beowulf has to enter her cave to deal with her.  I know. It's so juvenile... but it's great fun to watch. For his part Beowulf, too, has shockingly present though technically invisible genitalia. In the entire Beowulf vs. Grendel section of the film there’s a lot of laughs to be had (you can decide for yourself if they’re intentional or un) discovering the ways they’ll hide Beowulf’s penis from view. I don’t think there’s a better joke in the movie than the one where Beowulf walks in slow motion towards the screen, a huge sword stuck in the foreground as a giant stand-in phallus. Subtle.

The movie loses all of those inhibitions once it comes to the bloodletting. Beowulf is more gruesome than any PG-13 fantasy I’ve seen. One can only assume it snuck around 300’s R rating by being an animated movie -- “You know, for kids” --only Beowulf is not a kids movie. The nervously tittering perpetual horniness aside this is an adult drama… albeit one suffering from arrested development. This is not to say that it’s a fussy high-minded period drama. Merely that it’s not a kid’s movie. Too bad really since the "acting" isn't expressive enough for potent drama and the real kick is in the visuals which kids might love.

Zemeckis and team have created a one of a kind (at least for now) experience but their take on the classic tale isn’t truly ancient in tone and not as poetic as it ought to be. It’s too modern for that. Beowulf isn't quite contemporary but there’s a distinct whiff of 1970s or 1980s fantasy geekiness in its character designs and visuals: these busty nude women and sword wielding barrel-chested men would feel right at home in a Boris Vallejo or Frank Frazetta painting, or slapped on the paperback cover of an old Tor book. At the risk of repeating myself: Subtle this movie is not. But then again, it doesn’t need to be. It's primary aim is to wow you with its visual techniques. Some people might laugh at it rather than with it but I appreciate the tallness of this tale. It’s going for big operatic moments. In the process to get there it finds a couple.