Review: Beowulf
Penguin February 7th, 2008
Rating: 2/4 stars
Beowulf is about how Beowulf (Ray Winstone) gets his epic. Beowulf is the grandaddy of all hero stories. Instead of following the epic, Zemeckis decides to take it in a slightly different direction.
The first thing you’ll notice, is that the entire thing is done in CG. Although, extremely life like, it’s still obvious that it’s CG. I can understand why Zemeckis is drawn to CG. As a filmmaker, it makes a lot of sense. You motion capture your talent and worry about the camera angles and everything else later. This gives you infinite possibilities.
Zemeckis chooses to take the two part structure approach to Beowulf. The first part deals with Grendel (Crispin Glover) and his Mother (Angelina Jolie). The second, deals with the curse of being king and the dragon (Ray Winstone). This makes Beowulf feel like two different stories.
I like the changes that Zemeckis took with the story. It gives Beowulf a lot more depth in terms of his character. There’s no doubt that Beowulf is a hero, but it calls into question, how big of a hero is he? And for a story that everyone is so familiar with, it’s a good change.
The action, mixed. The fight with Grendel is too dark unexciting. The dragon fight, that was good. There’s this sense that Beowulf might actually fail. It might be because we know that Grendel loses. How often do we talk about Beowulf and the dragon? But because the way that Zemeckis has set things up, there’s that tension in the final battle.
If you can sit through the first half, Beowulf definitely pays off. If you caught it in 3D, you were lucky. I can just imagine how much better it would’ve been.
-Penguin
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