Special effects and stuff

Rating: 7/10 (17 November 2007)

This was a slightly over-long movie, with too many slow spots in between. However, I'm glad I went to see it in IMAX 3D, as it heightened the enjoyment, above what it normally would've been. I'd highly suggest you see it in 3D too, rather than in the normal version.
One thing I was surprised to find out was that this was a completely animated movie, and not a live action movie with special effects. That's because the characters in the movie all mostly looked like the actors who were just playing their voices. Anthony Hopkins looked like Anthony Hopkins, Brendan Gleeson looked like Brendan Gleeson, and of course Angelina Jolie looked like Angelina Jolie (most of the time). So when I saw the trailers, I just assumed it was just live action. It was an interesting choice to make the characters look like their voice actors who we're all familiar with.
However, that's not to say that it was perfect. I found the characters' expressions were lifeless. I wish they had put some scanners on the voice actor's faces and replicated them to their animated character's faces. This is a problem with a lot of animated movies trying for authenticity -- they just never get the facial expressions right, for example the Final Fantasy movie. It isn't such a problem with a character based on Angelina Jolie, who has relatively few facial expressions, but it was a problem for the Anthony Hopkins character (King Hrothgar), the Ray Winstone character (Beowulf), and especially Robin Wright Penn's character (Wealthow). Wealthow looked like a marionette throughout the movie with almost no expressions on her character's face. Also, in some scenes the Angelina Jolie character looked like her (almost too perfectly, her animated body was much curvier than her real life body), but in other scenes it didn't look like her at all. It doesn't look like they paid attention to quality control throughout the whole movie.
Also a warning about the 3D effects. It is somewhat headache inducing. The movie looks 3D alright, but mainly like the flattened 3D like what you would see inside a Viewmaster stereoscope. Foreground objects pass in front of background objects like you would expect in 3D, but the foreground objects look like 2D cardboard cutouts; there is no depth to the foreground objects themselves. I hope some future 3D technology takes care of this annoyance.