Zemeckis' Beowulf Captures Motion--But Crtitics, Not So Much

Is Robert Zemeckis' Beowulf really, as some Hollywood denizens (and journalists) have hinted, the first draft of the cinema future ? Perhaps so--with its technically advanced motion capture magic, in the 3-D version it can make you shrink back in your seat as a pointy spear plummets toward you (or maybe lean forward towards a reconstructed--like she needed that? --Angelina Jolie.) But as it debuts this weekend with an expected take approaching $30 million, a lot of reviewers seemed to wish it wasn't cinema present.

Even some of the friendlier reviews like that of the Toronto Globe and Mail's Jason Anderson (he cited "compelling performances" from title character Ray Winstone, as well as Anthony Hopkins and John Malkovich) led to caveats like Anderson's,

As it stands, Zemeckis' movie is only the beta version of the blockbuster of the future, ridden with imperfections that will presumably be corrected in later upgrades.

The truly unconvinced, like Newsweek's David Ansen ("Zemeckis has been seduced by the siren call of motion capture... Memo to Zemeckis: come back to earth!) And the Los Angeles Times' Kenneth Turan ("Zemeckis...has gone from being a director of stories like Forrest Gump to an orchestrator of eye candy and a willing slave to technological advances.") seemed to view the work as thee crack of cinema doom. "Did anybody ever weep over the tragic fate of a statue at Madame Tussaud's?" asks Ansen, and Turan spits, "Rarely has so much expensive technique been put at the service of such feeble and pathetic screenwriting."

Having journeyed yesterday to one of L.A.'s Imax cinemas, (at Universal City Walk, which is like Blade Runner after a good Lysol spray-down), I can assert there are some real visual thrills to be had watching Beowulf. Production Designer Doug Chiang (who did fine work on Zemeckis' more reined-in Polar Express) has created a dragon that has Winstone's eyes (the script is full of human-creature miscegenation) and a great look as it flaps and skitters across the screen. This happens even as Winstone's Beowulf, with the phony musculature of a Hollywood gym rat, goes stutter-stepping alongside him with all the verisimilitude of a first-generation video game.

As for what the trailer promised of Angelina Jolie, which you'll be only too eager for it after the talky opener (John Malkovich plays a creepy professor who--wait, that's Art School Confidential--anyway, he's grubby and bitter) and a headache- inducing battle, well--it was said best by Tim Robey of England's Telegraph: "Angelina Jolie gets digital breast implants - would they have given Einstein a bigger brain?"

Using a sinister vocal persona reminiscent of her not-so-epochal role as Colin Farrell's mom in Alexander, here she nurtures the muck-and-sinew Grendel, acted by a keening Crispin Glover. Why do we need a phony Angelina when the real one is plenty spectacular enough, as in the unrated Original Sin DVD? (Hey, wait--okay; see you guys when you come back from Amazon.com).

Winstone's a fine actor who's given some meat to play--the idea is, our hero is very brave and way cut, but he's an ego-ridden blow hard and horn dog--a kind of compound of Brad Pitt's Achilles with Jim Jones, Joey Buttafucco, and the Bad Lieutenant (The director toys with showing his privates until the joke, as with other perhaps satirical moments in which the film snickers up its own sleeve, grows tiresome.)

Zemeckis, in the press notes, has the perspicacity to note that Beo's right-hand warrior, played by Brendan Gleeson, "Turns out to be...if not the most interesting character, at leas tone of them." Robin Wright Penn does her best with a) an ersatz Glen Ballard/Alan Silvestri Viking ballad, and b) skin as permanently smooth as a Macy's mannequin.

Finally, the 3-D glasses. The old yellow-framed ones were frankly geeky; the new ones are compact, so they fight it out with your regular spectacles, and still look like the G.I. specs that grunts call "government birth control".

Well, that's it from Row 30. Thought this is nominally a $150 million film and will be held to account accordingly, Paramount has hedged its bets pretty well. Financier Steve Bing put up the first $100 million, Warner Bros. is in the deal with foreign distribution (which is day and date, i.e., simultaneous with the American releases, and with a video game roll out of course part of the push), and it needn't depend solely on its 740 3-D screens--the total screen count is 3, 164.

That's the widest domestic roll-out of a digital 3-D film to date, and watching closely will be the studios who have major bets that by 2009, there will be enough properly equipped cinemas to give them a wide marketplace for James Cameron's Avatar and DreamWorks Animation's Monsters vs. Aliens.

At the moment, the two people most on tenterhooks may be the screenwriters, who gave a series of self-congratulatory interview to (mostly web media and have watched the film roll out to critical approval that's hovering just below 70 percent. You get a taste of their thinking in the below sound bite sandwich piled together from a couple of fan boy sites:

Roger Avary: It's not too unlike adapting a video game.
Neil Gaiman: Really! That's it exactly.

Avary: But it's really going to play in Denmark, let me tell you!
Gaiman: Both of the Danes are going to see it.
Gaiman:

This is one of the reasons we can write together. Roger goes "Blahblahblahblahblahblahblah", and I go, "Well, actually, 'Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.'"
Avary: Like chocolate and peanut butter, we're two great tastes that taste great together.