Beowulf, the animated adaptation of the Old English epic poem, is causing a fair amount of overheated excitement in Hollywood.
Jeffrey Katzenberg of DreamWorks crowed that this new form of 3D cinema would resuscitate an ailing box office; Michael Lewis, CEO of the company that developed the technology, Real D, said that ”once you see this new format, it’s hard to go back. It’s like black and white. Once you’ve seen colour, you don’t want to go back.”
This seems overstated. Many of us can happily ”go back” to black-and-white movies; they have an elegance most of today’s movies lack, and are often much easier on the eye. The idea that ”many film experts believe that it [3D] is as important as the advent of sound and colour”, as a recent Ster-Kinekor press release has it, is also preposterously overstated.
In any case, the new digital 3D is pretty much the same as the old 3D, so we are already in fact going back — to a fad that has been dying slowly for several decades now. Perhaps 3D is a minor technological advance, but it is certainly not an artistic one.
It does nothing for the Beowulf story other than contrive a repetitive series of things moving suddenly towards the viewer: coins are rolled at you, spears are thrust in your face, foreground objects loom and people keep getting thrown at you. That’s all 3D can do, so it simply does it again and again. (For those likely to get seasick, there is apparently a normal version to be seen too. We critics weren’t given a choice.)
The Beowulf epic was set in the fifth or sixth century AD, and transcribed from oral form 1 000 years ago. The film moves the story a century or two forward, not that it matters much, and animates the tale in the style director Robert Zemeckis first tried out on The Polar Express a few years ago. This is motion-capture animation, in which live actors do the basics and then are painted over, reanimated and integrated with computer-generated backgrounds.
It’s rather like turning film into a colouring-in book, and I can’t really see that this is an artistic success either. Maybe it gives more scope for interesting effects, but it also deadens every surface and makes the characters’ actions jerkily ungraceful. Everything looks plastic, as though a Ken doll had appeared in the eighth century, and the actors look like ineptly controlled marionettes.
Perhaps it’s just that the action and the effects in Beowulf aren’t particularly good. There didn’t seem much that was fresh or new or exciting in it. Ray Winstone, not exactly known as Mr Buff Action Hero, gets part of his face pasted on to a pair of digitally enhanced cheekbones, and then this new head is grafted on to a generic gym body with a few artfully added scars.
What remains is the Winstone cockney accent, which contrasts oddly with Anthony Hopkins’s
Royal Shakespeare Company tones, not to mention John Malkovich doing the full Meryl Streep — trying out every accent from eighth-century Norse-American to John Gielgud on Valium. And still most of his utterances sound like someone reading out a list of dignitaries at a government function.
Hopkins is at least playing a king; Winstone’s Beowulf is a boastful bovver boy come to slay the monster Grendel — basically, a giant Gollum who’s just come out the back end of a combine harvester. Grendel’s mom is Angelina Jolie painted gold, given an extra-long self-propelled ponytail and stiletto heels on her feet (very eighth-century, that) and with a face looking like it has been tightly wrapped in cellophane.
By the time we get to the final dragon-slaying episode the dragon has been completely
computer-generated, and looks all the better for it. The script does give Beowulf an interiority that might seem alien to the fifth- or eighth-century conception of heroic character, and adds some relationship intrigue.
It also alludes to the fact that Beowulf takes place as the pagan gods and monsters are giving way to Christianity, though it doesn’t do much with that content. Still, all this adds a little depth and interest in the second half of the film. Otherwise there’s not much to keep the attention from flagging, apart from having to keep the 3D glasses on one’s face and squinting to keep the film in focus.
It feels as though all the technological conjuring has distracted the filmmakers from concocting a better story or writing dialogue that was less, or more, than laughable. Certainly they expended their greatest amount of creative energy in an early scene where Beowulf decides he has to fight Grendel naked.
This means that a great deal of trickery must be devoted to hiding his Beowilly (Grendel doesn’t have one, which might explain some of the motivation here). Candles, swords, anything that comes to hand — they all suddenly loom up in the foreground, precisely in front of the heroic crotch, as Beowulf athletically leaps around the mead hall fighting Grendel.
Perhaps this prudery is a Simpsons-style joke, or it’s necessary to avoid a higher age restriction. Beowulf ‘s target market is, after all, about 12 to 15. Hideous monsters are okay and the odd limb-severing adds to the excitement, but the gods protect our youth from a motion-captured penis.
