Beowulf (2007)

Beowulf. Film review. One immediate disturbing feeling i had when i saw this film is the shouting of the word, "I!.Am!.Beowulf!" which was rather too often pronounced in a clear and strong syllable by the main male and title character, Beowulf (Ray Winstone) in a manner that reminds me too much of Leonidas in 300 whenever he felt that we need some convincing pounded into our thick skull that he (or we) was (or were) in fact, in Sparta. Other that, probably because i had seen the film in a small screen, i felt a little bit bored and impatience throughout the film.

With script penned by one of my favorite writer, Neil Gaiman, i was a little bit surprised and disappointed that i found myself hadn't really liked the film. The film was animated in its entirety with the characters modeled after the real actor/actresses that voiced each characters. This approach made it easy to render the character in doing something that they wouldn't normally do otherwise, such as Anthony Hopkins's bare buttock, or Angelina Jolie's gasp-oh-my-god-she's-almost-nude, or prominently, the fighting scenes where these characters choreographed for doing stunts that rather hard to imagined otherwise. Considering the animation, i haven't seen anything relatively new nor breathtaking in this film.

Loosely (or not, i couldn't really tell actually) adapted from an ancient poem, Beowulf is a story of a man - with a penchant to say his name out loud, "I!.Am!.Beowulf!" - with his crew of warriors in one of their journey for a quest to made sure the world has one less monster to worry. This journey brought them to the shore of Denmark where a nasty monster, Grendel, salvaging and terrorizing the nearby towns. But it is of course, more than just meet the eye that even though at first Beowulf was able to rid Grendel, something kept him in the land, and indebted to it. Years later, wether he liked it or not, he himself must paid his debt. I would prefer to read the story rather than watching it. An interesting approach at first, but it was quickly grow old. In my case, it was most likely because of the lukewarm, half-baked animation in which this film presented itself. As i've said earlier, it doesn't offer something entirely new. I had seen similar action sequences and animation, probably better in various game i had played in my PS2 (see: God of War, God of War II) months, maybe even years ago. In short, the animation is smooth but it somehow still needs few polishing.

Overall, the film's main selling was undoubtedly its animated sequences. The fact that the animated characters' eyes doesn't talk very much is what had probably made this film doesn't work for me. Despite the palpable likeness to the real actors they modeled from, there's almost no spark of liveliness if you look into their eyes and made the overall film, once the minutes grow old, look more and more cartoony. Half way into the film, i was running this film on background while i fired up TextEdit.app to wrote this.