Beowulf

Entertaining and thought-provoking, even moving

"Beowulf" (2007) is an animated version of the epic poem of antiquity featuring Ray Winstone, Anthony Hopkins, Angelina Jolie and Robin Wright Penn. It uses live action motion capture animation, which was previously utilized for The Polar Express (2004) and Monster House (2006). Although it's a "cartoon" it's the equivalent of an R-rated picture with brutal violence and openly sexual situations & dialogue.

The film has the same characters as the epic poem Beowulf, Hrothgar, Wiglaf, Grendel, Grendel's mother and the dragon and the three Acts split between Beowulf's fight with Grendel, Grendel's "sea hag" mother and the dragon; other than this the film deviates from the poem with s...

Beowulf hasn't aged well; it looked like crap when it was released in 2007, and it looks like old crap 15 years later. This movie plays like someone made a videogame based (loosely, natch) on the epic poem, then took all the cutscenes out and edited them together into feature length. Now, if only Beowulf came with an option to skip the cutscenes.

The film features human characters animated using live action motion capture animation, but I fail to see why they even bothered. Five years after The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, which was the first feature film to utilize a real-time motion capture system, the novelty should have surely worn off; moreover, this technology hasn't aged any more gracefully than Beowulf has, and even today t...

It was just too much...but to be fair I saw it in 3D. The none 3D version may have actually been better, but honestly I have no way of knowing.

At first it was, well, it was wow. I had never actually seen anything in 3D, being far too young for for the first round of popular 3D movies to hit the theater, but my father assured me it was nothing compared to this...

He also assured me it didn't make him as nauseous, and sometimes I can see where he's coming from on that point.

It came out right in the first wave of the new 3D, right when 3D was becoming popular again and actually worth it.

And it was jaw dropping even if some of the motion made my old man sick.

But it was also too much. A new technology and one that was a specta...