Digital Beowulf is a 3-D stunner

Perfect humans have not yet been animated. Several films have come close, and Beowulf is the new leader, but there is still much work to do.

Humans, as simple as our movements seem, are too elegant and unique for a computer to animate perfectly. If the motions aren’t synchronized with absolute precision then what are supposed to be totally believable pixilated humans come off as cartoonish as Bugs Bunny jumping into Elmer Fudd’s shotgun.

Beowulf has many sequences that support the illusion that yes, indeed, those digital humans could pass convincingly for real humans and 80 percent of the general public wouldn’t know it in a blind test, say a series of TV commercials. Beowulf’s characters look that good. But — you had to know there was a “but” coming — there are many sequences that break the illusion entirely and remind us that we’re watching a digital world. The spread is about so: half the movie feels like a live-action movie, half feels animated. Considering all of it is animated, that’s pretty good.

More than ever, and this is a testament to the skill of the animators, I’m frustrated with the “acting” of the characters and not so much the way they move or look. No matter how real a digital creation looks, it should be held to the same standards as real-human actors. The characters of Beowulf spend long passages gazing into the eyes of women, or into the oblivion pondering their fates. And as good as they look, they seem to be making acting mistakes. They also seem vacant, as lifeless as the computer monitors they were created upon.

I should stop. Here I am halfway through a review and all I’ve talked about is the animation. It’s warranted, though. This is a technical film, and people are more likely to discuss how creepy-real the characters are before they discuss the plot.

Beowulf is, of course, based on the 10th Century poem describing the life and adventures of the warrior Beowulf. I have never read the original poem so when I Googled its plot, I was not surprised to find that this Beowulf veers into its own translation of the codex. But I guess that’s beside the point since most of those who will be seeing the film this weekend will be going not to see Norse literature but to take a gander at Angelina Jolie’s naked front, which resembles one of Auric Goldfinger’s victims if they had lived. Yes, Jolie is in Beowulf. And yes, she gets mighty naked. Remember, that’s not Jolie, but a stack of pixels.

And for the ladies, or the gay audience still swooning from 300, there is a male character who not only sheds his armor and medieval underpants (undoubtedly made of chain mail) but also grapples naked with a monster, which had to be awkward for the monster — “Cleave my skull but get that out of my ear, please.”

Jolie plays one heck of a mother — Mommy Dearest in Viking format — who orchestrates a variety of sons against the warrior Beowulf, who is played by Ray Winstone, although he does not look like Ray Winstone even as other characters look like their voice actors. Beowulf has been summoned by a king to rid his land of a monster named Grendel (Crispin Glover!!!), a hideously disfigured giant who finds anything above a whisper as agonizing as his dentistry. Beowulf, the good soldier that he is, slays Grendel and draws the wrath of Grendel’s mother (Jolie).

I intentionally neglected to warn of a spoiler alert for the above paragraph because that part of the text hasn’t changed in a millennia. For the rest of this graph, though, spoiler alert — feel free to skip down. Beowulf makes a pact with Grendel’s mother and retains the throne in the land as long as he produces an offspring to replace Grendel. So what happens when a slithery apparition with the body of the female half of Brangelina mates with the most ultimate warrior? A fire-breathing dragon — smoking hot, but in a bad way.

For those of you rejoining the text, we were discussing a dragon, which appears in the film’s climactic fight sequence. Beowulf, now in his 50s and as grey as Steve Martin at 21, embarks on a dragon-slaying mission worthy of any of the Lord of the Rings movies. The dragon’s scaly appearance and movements are fantastic, as are those of the monster Grendel, who looks as though he had an Old Testament’s worth of leprosy injected into his twisted form.

I’ve already spoken at length on animation, but it warrants a return. Some things aren’t animated well: the second appearance (post-nudity) by Jolie’s bad mommy, horse and riders, and many of the fighters in the first Grendel attack. But there are moments in Beowulf where faces (bearded ones especially) are as real as yours and mine. It’s so real, it’s kind of creepy. (Although not as creepy as director Robert Zemeckis’ last animated movie, The Polar Express.)

Creepy is the way many people thought of certain characters in the last human-replicating animated movie, Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within. Beowulf has learned from that film and gone a few steps farther to its success.

But how real is too real? Scientists and robot engineers have long theorized that a mechanical robot that is too human will weird people out, so they have gone to extra lengths to make their mechanical creations appear more robotic than necessary, as if giant lugnuts and exposed wires somehow make an intelligent robot less threatening to mankind’s fragile ego. I think we’re on the edge of that same kind of thinking here with animated movies. How far should animation go?

While the animators work that out, go and enjoy Beowulf and marvel at how far we’ve come from Steamboat Willie.

143 words on 3 dimensions and 13 ratings
If you have the chance to see the movie in 3-D, do so. That extra dimension of picture really does enhance the dazzling animation. And like Meet the Robinsons before it, Beowulf’s 3-D is not so much popping from the screen — although blood, spears, swords and fire occasionally do breach the screen — but the 3-D effect opens the back of the screen to give depth and distance to its scenes. It feels like watching a live performance on a stage, where the screen is the edge of the stage and the actors can exist in foreground and background.

As for the PG-13 rating, what was the MPAA thinking? Nude characters, monsters, sexual innuendo, deaths, decapitations, impalements … Beowulf is a bucketful of gibs away from being an iMac’d version of Braveheart. But no F words, kiddies, so come watch the digital blood spray.

***Elements of this review ran originally in the West Valley View.***