Beowulf.

"Robert Zemeckis's Beowulf is so rousingly entertaining that you'll feel guilty for not reading the epic poem all the way through when you were in ninth grade," announces Alonso Duralde at MSNBC. "[S]creenwriters Neil Gaiman and Roger Avary have taken broad liberties with the ancient text, although their departures translate to the screen quite well for the most part."

"It is pop. But as pop goes, it's damned good pop," writes David Poland, who insists that you see it in 3D, preferably IMAX 3D.

Updated through 11/17.

"Every age, it seems, has its own private Beowulf, a retelling of the 8th century Anglo-Saxon classic in the context of its tastes and preoccupations," writes Louis Sahagun in Los Angeles Times. "In the movie Annie Hall, after Diane Keaton expresses an interest in enrolling in college classes, Woody Allen advises, 'Just don't take any course where you have to read Beowulf.' But scholars, authors and fans say the poem endures because it is a timeless yarn about brave souls purging peaceful societies of agents of evil. Beyond that, the story's built-in ambiguities and rough edges have always invited meddling." A brief history of such meddling follows.

"Hollywood is forever searching for a new toy, a new medium, anything to lure ever-dwindling audiences away from their state-of-the-art home viewing systems and back to the multiplex," writes Lesley O'Toole. "It thinks it has found it in this new amalgam encapsulating 3D and a technique once called 'motion capture' now called performance capture ('perfcap' in the industry). As James Cameron, a pioneer in the field likes to explain, 'Actors don't do motion, they do emotion.'" And O'Toole talks with most of the cast of Beowulf. "John Malkovich says: 'To me it was remarkably reminiscent of doing plays. You get up in the morning and put on all your dots. And then you act all day. A lot of the things that might have come into play in normal filmmaking don't: you don't wait for lights, or for camera repositioning. Continuity doesn't really matter. For most of us it was quite liberating.'"

For Premiere, Stephen Saito lists "20 Benchmark Films in Computer Animation History."

Online listening tip. At IFC News, Matt Singer and Alison Willmore discuss "whether or not motion capture can be considered animation, and the benefits of keeping things stylized."

Updates, 11/14: "Beowulf, you'll be pleased to hear, is a vast improvement, and the use of a technology which creates an altered version of reality seems somehow appropriate for a story so entirely routed in fantasy," blogs Ben Child for the Guardian. "On the other hand, for a movie which features what should be appalling scenes of men having their heads bitten off and gently crunched by Grendel, perhaps the most hideous creature ever to be shown on the big screen, not to mention Angelina Jolie starkers, it somehow fails to really get the blood pumping. And I can't help feeling that's down to the fact that the use of CGI is less affecting than live film. If it's not real, why should we react to it as though it were?"

"Beowulf is only one of a slew of recent movies that wouldn't have been possible without The Lord of the Rings, and Zemeckis lifts dozens of shots directly from Peter Jackson," writes Jürgen Fauth. "Of course, Tolkien in turn would be unthinkable without the Anglo-Saxon poem - and so we come full circle."

Updates, 11/15: Beowulf's "cathartic journey, from boorish egotist to self-lacerating Christ figure, is effortlessly compelling and, at times, moving," writes Kevin Maher in the London Times.

"Crispin Glover portrays Grendel, certainly the most strange and hideous character of his 26-year acting career," writes Chris Lee in the Los Angeles Times. "Which is really saying something if you're at all familiar with Glover, a guy known for his bizarro behavior, indelibly weird performances and aesthetic of elaborate hideousness. He has, after all, filled his underpants with cockroaches (in David Lynch's 1990 film Wild at Heart), shepherded murderous rats (in the oddball 2004 horror flick Willard) and tortured snails (in Glover's controversial 2005 directorial debut, What Is It?). Although 'eccentric' is the description that comes up most frequently in describing the writer-director-author, who is currently in the midst of a career transformation."

"Ladies and gentlemen, I have seen the future of motion-picture entertainment, and to tell you the truth, it's a little goofy," writes Premiere's Glenn Kenny. "Director/would-be visionary Robert Zemeckis's second feature-length foray into computer-animation enhanced 3-D digital whatever-the-hell-you-call-it is - in stark contrast to the kid-oriented first, The Polar Express - a rip-roaring, rip-snorting, rip-your-arm-out-of-its-socket, gore-steeped, and sex-soaked medieval (on-your-ass) adventure. As a boyhood-and-beyond fan of Ray Harryhausen pictures, I like a good flying, fire-breathing dragon as much as the next fellow. Beowulf's excesses, though, are such that the film ought to carry the subtitle ...But This Is Ridiculous."

Updates, 11/16: "Stripped of much of the original poem's language, its cadences, deep history and context, this film version of Beowulf doesn't offer much beyond 3-D oohs and ahs, sword clanging and a nicely conceived dragon, which probably explains why Mr Zemeckis and his collaborators have tried to sex it up with Ms Jolie, among other comic-book flourishes," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. "The same no doubt accounts for why [Ray] Winstone, an actor of substantial stomach girth who is every inch a sexy beast in his own right, has been transformed into a generic-looking gym rat complete with six-pack. Somewhere in B-movie heaven Steve Reeves is smiling."

"Zemeckis takes real actors - fancy, expensive actors - and pays them to act, and then covers them up with dead-in-the-face computerized bullshit," writes Lindy West in the Stranger. "Because it's the future, or something.... Beowulf would be a perfectly enjoyable, corny, exciting, dumb action movie if it weren't for the criminally unnecessary Madame Tussaud makeunder. Bullshit, I say."

"[A]m I the only one who suspects that the intention of director Robert Zemeckis and writers Neil Gaiman and Roger Avary was satirical?" asks Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times.

"Beowulf is wildly silly and there are a few groanworthy moments," writes Peer Bradshaw in the Guardian. "But once you have acclimatised yourself to the animation style, it tells a cracking good story, and the screenplay by Neil Gaiman and Roger Avary conjures a secret history of vulnerability and human weakness behind the legend. Their inventions are witty and sometimes rather brilliant."

"Making heavy weather of its lesser plot-strands, Beowulf seems to peter out halfway and then rallies for a mighty dragon fight, over forests and bridges and castle turrets, its hero and audience clinging on for dear life," writes Tim Robey in the Telegraph. "It's a wild, lusty and exhilarating spectacle - catch it in Imax 3D if you possibly can."

Nick Schager in Slant: "In essence, Beowulf is porn for 13-year-olds, as it caters to two of the most basic, primal fantasies of hetero adolescent males: slaying a dragon and bedding Angelina Jolie."

"To assuage the fears of the poem's fans, let me say that Robert Zemeckis's Beowulf has as much to do with Beowulf the poem as that Bob Hoskins movie does with Super Mario Bros," writes John Constantine for Nerve. "Zemeckis even says as much in the movie's press kit: 'Frankly, nothing about the original poem appealed to me.' With that out of the way, the movie's pretty swell."

"What is most troubling about Beowulf, aside from the obvious, is what it says about the career of Robert Zemeckis, who has gone from being a director of stories like "Forrest Gump" to an orchestrator of eye candy and a willing slave to technological advances," writes Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times. "If you want to understand what the pressure of Hollywood does to talent, if you want to experience where the movie business is heading in a big way, this benighted but likely remunerative film is the place to start."

Updates, 11/17: The NYT's Dave Kehr gets visual effects artists Ken Ralston and Jerome Chen on the phone to talk about "the new challenges posed by Beowulf and how the Imagemotion technology has evolved to keep up with them."

"The big problem is that Beowulf, like The Polar Express before it, is just so damned creepy to look at," writes Salon's Stephanie Zacharek. "The characters, in their chain mail and woollies and rough homespun gowns, move more smoothly than any mere human being ever could; their skin has a weird, clammy look, and they peer out of glassy humanoid eyes. There's something very Children of the Corn about them.... It has become hard to remember the days when Robert Zemeckis - formerly a wonderful filmmaker - made real movies, things like Cast Away, Death Becomes Her and Back to the Future, though they weren't all that long ago."

"You want to read Beowulf?" asks Time's Richard Corliss. "Get the book, I'm not stopping you. You want bloody adventure with a brain, see the movie."

Posted by dwhudson at November 13, 2007 3:32 PM