I Am Blogger. Writer. Poster. I Am The Partial Plates In The Night. I! AM! JON!

Okay, so maybe it lacks some of the punch of “I! AM! BEOWULF!”
(Or even “THIS! IS! SPARTA!”)
As should be immediately apparent, I went to see Beowulf last night, along with Scott and Casey.
We went to the digital 3D version.
Short form, Internet-speak review: It was Teh Awesome.
The longer, slightly spoilery version follows.
It’s been about sixteen years since I last read Beowulf. The first time was in high school, the second in college. In high school, I believe we were only required to read through the Grendel portion, so it wasn’t until college that I got to the part involving Grendel’s mother.
Regardless, my memory of this first major English epic is spotty at best, so how accurate the movie adaption was is a question I can’t really answer.
What I can say is that the movie kicked ass in ways that will, I think, be much more memorable than the actual poem.
While the story – by Neil Gaiman and Roger Avary – is a good one, and adds considerable depth to what could otherwise be a simple telling of the story of a mighty hero and his accomplishments, with a lot of easily-spotted Gaiman touches, the movie’s real appeal lies in the stunning animation. The look of the CGI characters animated over the capture performances of the actors, lends then an unearthly affect. They are at times indistinguishable from real human beings, at other times it’s clear they’re not really there, all of which lends the overall look a kind hyper-reality, as though you’ve developed some new kind of vision and are looking upon the world for the first time.
Much of that comes from it being 3D, I think, and though I’m sure that the non-3D version is also cool, I would definitely recommend that anyone seeing it opt for the 3D version.
Given that Beowulf fights Grendel au naturel, the fact that they borrow a trick from Austin Powers (or The Simpsons Movie, though thankfully without the final touch that made the gag in that movie so funny) to keep conveniently obscuring the naughty bits is positively a godsend, as we were spared from having a 3D experience like this:




And for the record, CGI Angelina Jolie, with her thin covering of some molten material and her stiletto heel-like talons, looks especially amazing.
I’ll have some more thoughts on the movie in a later post.