With Anthony Hopkins as the 8th dwarf: Freaky.

Don’t get me wrong, I am a massive fan of the fantasy movie-genre, and as such I am more than willing to cut even the worst of the genre some slack for simply being what they are. Also, as a good gay man, I am not at all opposed to the current spate of action-ish movies that show reasonably buff men in reasonably little outfits, but the line needs be drawn somewhere.
Quite literally drawn, in the case of Beowulf, the latest Gaiman-penned screenplay to hit the silver screen in Holland. This fully CGI’d movie butchering and then raping one of the oldest surviving English stories has truly taken the cake with regards to just over the top application of available techniques and moral values.

There is an idea in animation and animatronics that is called the “uncanny valley”, coming from the idea that the more like a person something looks, the more we feel affiliated with them. In other words, the emotional response to something that looks like a human is more positive than something that does not look human. Up to a point. It turns out that when something comes close to looking human but quite clearly isn’t, we feel negative or uncomfortable towards them, but then as soon as they are less and less distinguishable from humans, we are fine with them as well. In short, the more something is clearly trying to look human, but isn’t, we find it uncanny, and if it is simply looking human, we find it acceptable. Apparently this is the reason people have averse reactions to clowns and zombies, because they kind of look human, but then again not.

Anyway, the problem with CGI-humans is that they never quite look human, for all the progress we have made in the field of hair and water as has been evidenced by the whole Shrek-line of movies, it is still all but impossible to reliably mimic the myriad of small muscle movements and suchlike that make a human really human. Thus CGI-Humans always look slightly, well, dead. And a full movie of slightly, well, dead humans just doesn’t really do It for me. After all, I loved Shaun of the Dead, but it did give me nightmares.
Beowulf, however, will not. Even though for most of its running time it wallowed in the shallow end of the uncanny valley, it had enough moments of reasonably pretty imagery to keep me from totally becoming freaked out. But just barely. That said; a good deal of the reasons I did not allow my willies to shiver me out of the theater is because I could barely keep my eyes of the screen. Not because it was so good, it was not, but because I kept wondering what horrible thing they were going to do to the story next.

The original story is very easy to surmise; Grendel kills people in hall, Beowulf kills Grendel, Grendel’s mother kills people in hall, Beowulf kills Grendel’s mother, Dragon attacks somewhere else, Beowulf kills dragon, but dies himself as well. Thus. 1700 lines of ye olde English masculine bovine excrement, but that’s just about the extent of it.
It is also, just about, the net result of this movie, only not quite.

Grendel, as the quintessential aggrieved neighbour, is a slightly to very grotesque thing, rotten skin all over, massive stature, and missing at least one ear and a cheek, but with an enourmous, and enourmously sensitive, eardrum. He goes berserk every time the king holds feasts in his hall and rather than banging a broomstick or posting a snide note on the communal message board, he just starts banging heads and chewing the communal messenger. Now if I were king, I’d move. But I’m not, and the king that is doesn’t. It’s rather sad, really, as Grendel really does have quite a good point, he is just a little overeager.
Anyways, enter B(eowulf), who as a rule has a tendency to slay or fight just about anything. He goes into the hall, falls madly in love with the zombie queen (CGI again) and decides he wants to have a piece of her graphically enhanced (meh) flesh, and the treasury of the kingdom. He sets his men to feasting while he strips, and when Grendel arrives, they fight, and B tears of the arm of the complaining interruption.

Yes. Strips. B, being brawny and MASSIVELY well bodied, apparently prefers to fight naked. Sure, he comes with all these reasons about how it’s only fair, and that if the enemy is unarmed and unprotected so should he be, but that doesn’t really explain why he starts undressing at the drop of a hat before having seen the enemy, or if there even is an enemy. Crickee, even in front of a fully clothed and well-axe-hung Frysian he starts undressing. Apparently the man like being nekkid. No skin of my back, as said, he has a good body, but the enourmous amount of candles, arms, knees, tables, balustrades, donkeys, lobsters, sea-monsters, dragon-scales, water, pointy helmets and otherwise items of a non-disclosing nature do get a little bit absurd very swiftly. Ah well, we do get CGI bum, and that did very much not suffer from any uncanniness.

Anyways, Grendel dead, Grendel’s mom, played by Angelina Jolie who looks like she is very much enjoying herself being all computer generated, comes to complain the next night. Violence apparently being genetic, she appears to B in a dream while she slaughters and hangs his men in the feast-hall by way of complaining. A slight overreaction maybe, but I know if anyone hurts my family I’m willing to write a VERY terse note so I suppose it all works out the same.

B follows her into her cave-lair, the woman is a water-demon, and naked as he is (again) she decides to not fight him but offer him the world if he just sleeps with her. Because she is Angelina Jolie, and the only woman in the time-period in heels (heels that apparently are a part of her body, by the way) B off course agrees, is made king of the land, and lives happily being fought by every other monster and his mother, but surviving on and on.

So far, apart from the not-fighting-but-fucking, the story follows reasonably closely the original story, and as such I have not spoilt too much of the happenings in this movie, while still expressing most of the things I really did not like to much about it or find absurd. Because it is slated to be one of the mayor movies of the winter season, I will not go on and spoil any more.
It is an entertaining move, but really, its crap, funny crap, entertaining crap, crap nonetheless. The main problem is that there is no acting whatsoever that is well picked up by the computer puppets, something I hoped I would look past after a while, but never quite did. I could not escape the idea that if they’d have just done a real life movie, it would have been better.

Stripes at 00110 “If my neighbour complains again, I’m ripping her arm off”

Grtz,
Kevin