Notes on Beowulf (2007)

Paramount/Warner Bros./ImageMovers, 115 min. Release Date: Nov. 16, 2007.

Cast

Commentary

Even though it feels like live action, there were a lot of shots where Bob [Zemeckis] cut loose. Amazing shots. Impossible with live-action actors. This method of filmmaking gives him freedom and complete control. He doesn't have to worry about lighting. The actors don't have to hit marks. They don't have to know where the camera is. It's pure performance.--Kenn MacDonald (animation supervisor)

I'm serious when I say the movie is funny. Some of the dialog sounds like Monty Python. No, most of the dialog does. . . . Grendel is ugly beyond all meaning. His battles are violent beyond all possibility. His mother (Angelina Jolie) is like a beauty queen in centerfold heaven. Her own final confrontation with Beowulf beggars description. To say the movie is over the top assumes you can see the top from here.--Roger Ebert

This retelling of the epic poem about a monster-slaying hero unites computer-generated imagery with live-action performances through the magic of motion-capture. Unfortunately, the marriage breeds a bizarre hybrid, as strange (if not quite as ghastly) as the half-human, half-demon Grendel that haunts the first act. Like that hideous monster, Beowulf is an almost inexplicable mutant mishap, as if the genetic synthesis combined--and somehow magnified--the worst rather than the best of both parents. The background designs are beautiful; the creatures are imaginatively conceived; the human characters are rendered in fine detail and enacted with spirited performances. And yet, the result is artificial and unconvincing, with all the life of a perfectly preserved corpse manipulated by marionette strings: no matter how deft the performer, no matter how elaborate the movments, what we are watching looks dead.--Steve Biodrowski, Cinefantastique