A Warrior Will Sooner Die Than Live A Life Of Shame

Rating: 6/10 (18 December 2010)

In the Middle Ages, a Danish tribe led by Hrothgar are plagued by a monstrous creature, Grendel. Beowulf, a warrior from a neighbouring state, comes to confront the beast and claim the King's reward. Can he defeat this evil and free the people from its curse ?
This is a great animated version of the classic Saxon poem, one of the oldest recorded stories in history. Zemeckis updates the motion capture technique he used previously in The Polar Express and the movie looks terrific, with fantastic attention to detail - hair, frost, dirt, candlelight - although just occasionally it creaks a little (the shots of the horses riding for instance). There are breathtaking pull-backs, dizzying overheads and stunning lighting tricks, like the moment in the cave when the dragon is revealed. Neil Gaiman and Roger Avary's script also takes some interesting liberties with the classic tale, turning Beowulf into a complex and tragic figure; in the original story he kills Grendel's mother, but the different take on that here leads to much more interesting second half. It also does a great job of evoking the drunken, debauched, wintry atmosphere of the story; it could so easily be stuffy and prosaic but instead is full of rabble-rousing action, curvy women and horrible monsters. Perhaps because of the mo-cap technology, the actors all give big, theatrical, lusty performances more akin to stage acting and deliver a great physicality to their roles. Winstone and Hopkins are both good fun, Penn is terrific and does some great singing, Malkovich for once isn't the villain, Glover is pretty unforgettable as the freakish miscreant Grendel with a weird pig-Dutch/German/English lingo, and Jolie does one of her sauciest self-test-your-heterosexuality slithering bits. The use of colour (primarily red and white) is outstanding, and there is fantastic music throughout by Alan Silvestri, all heaving drums counterpointed with delicate strings. The film was designed by talented artist Doug Chiang (Jumanji, The Phantom Menace) and almost everything in it, from the golden chalice to Grendel's severed arm, is crafted with great care and imagination. This movie is perhaps not as well known as it should be, because it's carrying on the traditions of Ralph Bakshi and Katsuhiro Otomo - whilst it's animated, it's not aimed at young kids. What it is however, is a beautiful updating of a story that literally spans centuries into the most modern technique of storytelling, and like all great stories it transcends the method used to tell it. For me, no-one has quite managed to do a full-blown computer-generated photo-realistic dramatic film of people yet (Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within comes the closest), but this is a bloody good try and a cracking picture of a timeless tale.