Wonderful Story, More-or-Less Wonderful Movie

Rating: 7/10 (16 November 2007)

I saw this movie today, the day it opened here. And had very mixed feelings about it.
The story, and the script undergirding the story, is to me the best part of the movie. The execution of the script was to me partly good, partly not so good.
I think it's the animation that most disappointed me. Maybe my expectations were staked too high based on pre-release buzz. But I'm really just mystified at those who rate the animation nearly perfect. Human faces and human bodies looked like comic book animation to me, except in those sequences in which either darkness or distance, or both, managed to obscure things enough to achieve a vivid genuineness that did indeed give me great pleasure.
Outside views of the Northern Danish snowy fastnesses were uniformly delightful, IMHO. My very favorite sequence was that with the dragon at the end of the movie. What a wonderful sequence. And the end of the movie was true Northern/Norse-mythic in content and execution: I loved it.
Acting was minimal but adequate for character depictions in a broad, sweeping mythic movie like this.
All in all, though, the story ... the amazing mythic story of Beowulf ... carries this movie and gives it what is to me a deeply satisfying telling of a tale that deserves to be told again and again and again.
Now if I can just get to see it in IMAX ...