Beowulf - Review

Director: Robert Zemeckis
Writers: Roger Avary/Neil Gaiman
Starring: Angelina Jolie/Ray Winstone
Runtime: 1 hr 53 minutes

I was curious to see if I would like Beowulf. I read the poem when I was a kid, and I'd seen a couple of theatrical takes on it. But I'd never seen it in animated form, and I am not a big fan of animated pictures.

The hero Beowulf has had numerous films made about him, and no wonder: he's the grandfather of an old theme. Westerns starring Clint Eastwood and John Wayne aren't very far from being Beowulf. The premise of "tough guy stranger driving evil forces from a village" has been around in poem and book form for centuries. Film has catapulted the tough-guy-stranger to mythic proportions, updating the story by exchanging his battle axe for a handgun.

This time, Beowulf gets the 3D treatment. I saw it at the Imax, and I had to wear funny glasses to view the production. They look like the type of glasses that old people wear when driving on the highway. The specs cover half your face, leave a red mark on the bridge of your nose, and make you feel vaguely silly, sitting in a dark room wearing sunglasses.

The impact that these glasses bring to the film is truly awe inspiring. The film is so good in 3D that I know it would suffer from seeing it the old-fashioned way. The depth of field in today's 3D pictures is so much better than it was in the old days that it's no comparison. When I was kid watching an Amityville Horror 3D picture and wearing the red/blue plastic sunglasses, I was lucky if anything looked 3D. Most of the time, it was your imagination that led you to think you were seeing something pop out of the screen. "Look! Green smoke!...I think."

Beowulf's effects are much, much better than you think they will be, and the filmmakers should be proud of it. The 3D isn't used as a gimmick. There aren't too many pop-out-to-scare-you 3D moments. The 3D is used to enhance the picture, not dominate it.

But 3D alone would not make Beowulf a great picture. What makes it great is the story. It's been modified by the screenwriter and director, but it is still recognizable as the Beowulf of old. Sure, it's one-dimentional as ever, but who cares? The movie was made for spectacle first, plotlines second. Watching heroes beat up bad guys is fun, in case you've forgotten.

In the story, Beowulf (Ray Winstone) comes to a Danish kingdom that is being harassed by the creature Grendel. The King, played by Anthony Hopkins, has said that he will pay any man a fortune to kill the creature. Beowulf takes him up on the challenge, and into battle he goes.

From there, the story begins to drift away from the original poem, but the characters remain true. There is some political intrigue in the story. The King is not as honest as he seems, and Grendel's mother is as crafty as she is evil (and beautiful, come to that: an animated Angelina Jolie is still Angelina Jolie).

There is a lot of swashbuckling fun in this picture. It bogs down a bit as a few modern Christianity-bashes creep into the film. I'm keeping my eye on this stuff only because it shows me that directors and screenwriters, no matter their desire to create compelling stories, cannot help but insert their religious and political views into any and all motion pictures. In Beowulf, an animated film about a poem from centuries ago, we find lines like, "Maybe we should pray to the new Roman god, Jesus Christ, to help us." The reply is, "No new gods can help us, we need a hero." Later on in the film, several characters are now wearing crosses and looking creepy, and one of them is crucified by an evil interloper. Converted to the new god, did you? Take that!

I bring it up because, really, what is the name Jesus Christ doing in this picture, and in those contexts? There is no subplot in the film dealing with the rise of Christianity in northern Europe, yet here we suddenly have weirdo monks and lines about a new god from Rome. Did medieval Denmark receive word of Christianity over the news wires and suddenly convert for the sheer hell of it? Strange.

I chose to ignore these strange bits of political fluff, which is what they are. More and more films today have pieces of sanctimonious trash floating through their stories, like tumbleweeds from the director's mind.

The action scenes in Beowulf are very good, and the cast is excellent. The animators have done a fine job of making the characters look like their real-life inspiration. Angelina Jolie and Anthony Hopkins are especially well done. Ray Winstone must have kissed the animators after seeing the final cut. Look up his picture on the web, then compare that to Beowulf's six pack abs. Artistic license, to be sure.

The film is a great achievement for the filmmakers and you should see it, but see it in 3D.

Photos: Yahoo Movies.