CGI characters and sets well-used for the story

Rating: 7/10 (19 June 2012)

Directed by Robert Zemeckis, this is a "performance capture" film. It stars performances by Ray Winstone, Anthony Hopkins, John Malkovich, Robin Wright Penn, Brendan Gleeson, and Crispin Glover. Oh, and Angelina Jolie.
Performance capture, also known as motion capture, basically means the actors wear skin tight clothes with markers on them and act in front of a green screen. Later, computers render the performance digitally, with costumes, sets, and even the characters created by algorithms. For some people, this is a killer, and they can't accept the movie as a movie. I have some agreement with this. Wright Penn's character, Wealthow, was a blank for me. Whatever expression the actress gave the character, it never showed on the CGI face. Brendan Gleeson's Wiglaf, on the other hand, was totally credible throughout.
But you must know that the sets, the costumes, the scenery, and the characters are all generated on computer and do not look photorealistic at all. My perspective was that I was watching a comic book playing out on the screen, with excellent illustrations and an actual story. In one scene, we see a dragon swimming underwater, breathing fire and making the water boil around its mouth - I thought this was excellent. The fantasy aspects of "Beowulf" worked wonderfully. But when the characters talked, the motions and facial expressions weren't real, and often I had no feeling that the characters were walking on whatever surface they were supposed to be on. Overall, I was not so distracted from it to have it spoil the story for me. And "Beowulf" certainly tells a story.
Scriptwriters Neil Gaiman and Roger Avary took liberties with the original story, an ancient English heroic poem of uncertain date and origin. I've read a translation of the poem, and the movie does not follow it too closely, but the screenplay is epic in itself and worked well for me. Scholars may be disappointed, but movie goers will not be. This is an action drama, with enough emphasis on character, loss, flaw, and disappointment to keep the adults in attention.
Because the movie is computer generated, the art aspects of the movie can really come to the fore. I did not feel ever that the performance capture aspects were used as tricks; Zemeckis kept the story in the forefront, with the animation as the servant of the story at all times. Both the old king (Hrothgar, played by Hopkins) and Beowulf (Winstone) had their flaws; no comic book (nor Old English, neither) heroes they. The artwork surrounding the characters was outstanding, in my very humble opinion, and added to the feel of the story.
I am a great fan of illustration, and I saw the movie as excellent illustration with very credible plot and characters. It has great action, although some may find the gore a bit much in the battle scenes. Because the performances are in computer, I think the scenes are more realistic than live action battles, and this realism may be disturbing to those that are disturbed by such things - you know who you are.
Glover performs as Grendel, and he gives a very interesting performance, taking Grendel far afield from the epic poem by making Grendel a touch more human than monster.
A couple of notes: Beowulf and his kin are not being called "geeks" in the movie; they are "Geats," natives of a no longer extant kingdom somewhere in Scandinavia. The most feared animals in Europe during the Dark Ages were bears. As was common among unschooled folk, it was considered bad luck even to say the word bear, so other terms were made up. In England, the common word was "brown," the color of the unnameable, which at the time was pronounced "bruin." In Scandinavia, bears were referred to as bee-wolves, a word combination having no meaning on its own now called a kenning. The Scandinavian spelling of bee-wolf was - you guessed it - Beowulf. So our hero is a bear, the most fearsome creature on the continent. The characters refer occasionally to their worship of Odin. Gaiman has written a novel called "American Gods," which has Odin as a central character. Other forms of Odin's name include Woden, Wotan, and surprisingly Mercury. Our day called Wednesday is a form of Woden's Day, the germanic form of the Latin Dies Mercurii, also known as mercredi in French and miercoles in Spanish, which use the latinate form. (Why we pronounce Wednesday "wenzdi" is another question.) Additionally, Gaiman wrote "The Sandman" series of comic books, which brings me back to the visualization of this movie as a comic book in action with most excellent illustration.