Forget the Monster -- Beowulf Just Kills
by Andrea M. Newton
November 17, 2007
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This review contains spoilers.
I really, really wanted to like the new Beowulf movie. For one thing, it's Beowulf. For another, it's co-written by Neil Gaiman.
But it's also entirely CG. And that had me worried.
Since I started doing CG myself a little over three years ago, it's ruined me for seeing movies with CG effects. Now not only is the writer in me analysing the plot, dialog, and character development while I'm watching the film, but I've also got an internal art critic nitpicking the CG. Ooo, gorgeous texture on that one, it murmurs during crucial scenes. But the posing's a little off. If they moved the hand a little bit this way...
Uh huh, my internal editor replies. They're doing a good job with the pacing, too. I like how they tied in such-and-such from the beginning to this part here. But, ouch, that's a clunky line of dialog. If they rewrote it like this...
Needless to say, I walked into the theatre with more than a little trepidation, because I really wanted to like the movie, but I was afraid I wouldn't.
The folks behind Beowulf gave me nothing to worry about.
Is It Live, or Is It CG?
When first I saw previews for Beowulf, I wasn't sure if it was live action or CG. Some parts, like Grendel's mother, looked live action. Others seemed obviously CG. It wasn't until I read about it on Neil Gaiman's blog that I knew it was, in fact, entirely CG.
The same holds true for the movie as a whole. Most of it is incredibly lifelike. I just finished my Jeanne d'Arc image last week, and I would love to have had a set of chainmail as realistic as Beowulf's for her.
The first exterior scene pulling back from Hrothgar's mead hall looks like it was filmed from a helicopter in Iceland, or somewhere equally cold and remote. I drooled over the trees, wondering what app they used to create them and could I get my hands on it?
And the scene with Beowulf and the Geats on their ship as it crested over an ocean swell during the storm blew all thought out of my mind. My dual internal editors could come up with nothing more intelligent than a harmonized, "Wow!"
The CG artists on Beowulf didn't skimp on the details, either. Using dynamic hair adds realism to a figure; giving the figure dynamic hair on his arms, too -- well, that's a thing beauty.
I also have to say that they did an impressive job with the eyes. Eyes are notoriously difficult to get right in CG, but they did a good job with them in Beowulf. The textures were highly realistic (if a little heavy on the jewel-tone glow in a few close-ups), and, with the exception of Unferth's awkwardly darting eyes when he emerges from the water after Grendel's first attack, tracked believably. Some folks have commented that the characters had "strangely dead eyes", but as someone who's done CG and knows how tough eyes are to get right, I was impressed.
Not everything was perfect, though. Most problems were minor (like the shape, texture, and posing of the fingers in some close-ups) and only noticeable because the rest of it was done so well. And because I'm a geek who does 3D computer graphics just for fun. We tend to look for these things.
The blood flowing and water scattering behaved like liquid in Zero-G. But that's a limitation of the technology, not the animators' skills. Give it time; CG will get there.
While the skin textures looked incredibly lifelike close-up -- you could count the pores on Beowulf's face in some of the later scenes -- at a distance they seemed flat. I'm just guessing here, but maybe a lack of subsurface scattering? Again, only noticeable because everything else was so realistic.
The characters also seemed a little facially non-expressive. Not a lot, not even enough that most people would notice anything on more than a subconscious level. But some. And I'm gonna let 'em slide on it. It's one thing to put in umpteen facial morph targets to photorealistically animate one character in a movie (like Gollum in Lord of the Rings). It's something else entirely to try to manage that for every character. Like my husband said when we were discussing it, at some point you have to decide between "good" and "good enough". Especially if you want to have any hope of getting the piece done.
The two most noticeable problems, however, and the only two I'm really going to hold the CG artists accountable for, were Beowulf galloping on his horse to beat the dragon back to Heorot, and Wealthow's face in the first half of the movie.
The Beowulf galloping animation was stiff and clunky -- it didn't look at all like a person riding a horse. I'd have to watch that scene several times to pinpoint what was wrong, but it almost seemed like Beowulf and the horse were two separate animations -- the horse posed and animated in one rhythm, and Beowulf in another. His body didn't move right with how the horse was moving. Which surprised me when I saw it because it was the first -- and only -- animation in the movie that was just outright bad.
Wealthow's face in the first half of the movie was how I knew, from the first preview I saw, that the movie had CG. I couldn't quite put my finger on what it was, but it just seemed off somehow. Like one of the characters from Shrek. It nagged at me whenever she was onscreen, until I finally realized what the problem was -- her jawline. I assume they morphed Robin Wright Penn's face to make her appear younger (not that she doesn't look fantastic now), but in doing so they lost her cheekbones and made her jawline oddly heavy and swollen. In the second half of the movie, when Wealthow is older, her face looks much more realistic, probably because it's closer to the actress' real facial structure. The textures also seemed better, which leads me to believe that they altered them for the first half to make Wealthow younger, and left them essentially as scanned for the second. Considering how much better the mature Wealthow looked, I can't help thinking that if they'd given her younger version a more defined jawline and cheekbones, she wouldn't have looked so, well, odd.
Of course, this could also be part of the danger of creating the character model to look like the actor. I've lost count of how many times I've seen The Princess Bride -- not to mention read the book. My friends and I don't just quote the movie while watching it; we recite entire scenes. For fun. With no TV in sight. So I'm very aware of what Robin Wright Penn looks like. If Wealthow had been created as a figure who looked nothing like the actress portraying her, I might have shrugged off the jawline as How She Looked.
All in all, though, I thought the CG was very well done. And, yes, I'm nitpicking with some of the problems I pointed out above. For the most part, they're things that 99% of the movie-going audience would never notice. But the fact that I have to work so hard to find anything that could be improved is a testament to how good a job they did on Beowulf.
Now I Know How They Felt About the Train
It took a little while to get used to the 3D effect -- things blurred and it was hard to see what was going on -- but after about ten minutes my eyes "learned" how to focus on the important action onscreen and everything fell into a natural depth of field.
Legend has it that an audience watching The Arrival of a Train at the Station by the Lumiere brothers in 1895 bolted from their seats because they thought the train was going to run over them. Whether or not that's true, when a handful of gold coins came flying out of the screen in the first scene of Beowulf, I ducked, then started to reach out a hand to grab a couple coins, then sat back and thought, "Now I know how they felt when they saw the train."
I still can't stop grinning when I think about it.
Beowulf doesn't use 3D just for the cool FX, though. Watching the movie, I had a real sense of my distance from the scenes, something I've never before experienced with a film. When the camera panned across the room and past a beam that was visually right beside me, I felt pulled closer to the action. It gave a feeling of actually being in the scene. That, by itself, heightened the tension and brought me to the edge of my seat.
Besides, having a rock that was kicked up by a horse go whizzing past your head is just plain cool.
There were a few times they seemed to push items into 3D "just because we can" -- a tree branch, a spear, things like that. Not something subtle that would be a natural part of the scene. It reminded me they were 3D and yanked me right out of the movie. Things like that were few and far between, though, so I'll let 'em slide.
I was a little disappointed that the glasses weren't the cardboard kind with the red and blue lenses we had when I was a kid. There's just something kinda nostalgic about those. But you can't have everything -- and if I have to give up my cardboard 3D glasses to get the greatly improved 3D experience that Beowulf offers, I'll make that sacrifice. Any day.
With Heartfelt Apologies to Neil Gaiman
In American Gods and a British One, I said that Mirrormask convinced me that Neil Gaiman's work is better as a book than a movie.
I take it back. I take it all back.
A half hour into Beowulf, I caught myself thinking, "You know, I wouldn't mind coming back to see this again." I got so caught up in the battle between Grendel and Beowulf that I almost yelled "Beowulf!" along with Ray Winstone when he bellowed it as a battle cry. Twenty-four hours later, my husband and I are still discussing the movie.
Things like a comparison of Hrothgar and Beowulf, both guilty of "the sins of the father". But which one had the greater sin? You could argue that the deformed Grendel is evidence that Hrothgar was more flawed than Beowulf, bad stock coming from bad seed. On the other hand, Grendel's mother wanted a son, and would certainly want him to be perfect and powerful. The strength, power, and beauty of his son could prove that Beowulf was more flawed and therefore gave more evil essence to Grendel's mother for her son. Then again, Beowulf's son could be better than Grendel simply because Beowulf was a better hero than Hrothgar -- a fact that, by itself, shows Beowulf to be the more perfect man. Of course, as the better hero, Beowulf had further to fall, so in committing the same fatal act as Hrothgar he committed a greater sin.
Then there's the symbolism of the horn. It's at the heart of the first major lie that Beowulf tells Hrothgar's court -- that he distracted Grendel's mother by tossing the horn into the swamp, and then killed her. Beowulf and his people are safe until Unferth gives the horn back to him -- bringing Beowulf not only face-to-face with the horn again, but with the lie behind it, too. (And why did Unferth give Beowulf the horn? Did he suspect Beowulf had lied? Or was he just giving it back because he was loyal to Beowulf and wanted to return to his king something he thought Beowulf treasured, only unwittingly bringing about the hero's demise?)
Caught up in the action of the movie, you don't think about these things until later. But once you do, different levels start to come out, and you see things you hadn't before. Neil Gaiman commented in his blog that he and Roger Avary wanted to explore the relationship between a person and the story about a person, and in that they were very successful. How different would Beowulf have been had he not been in a society where a man was judged by his legend, where being a hero who killed monsters made you worthy of respect, even if you were otherwise a lying, boastful, arrogant bastard? Would he have succumbed to Grendel's mother? Would he have lied about it? How much is he Beowulf because he's Beowulf, and how much are his actions driven by the legends people believe about him?
In exploring this idea, Gaiman and Avary develop each character deeply. Even secondary characters have multiple levels to them. One of my favorites is Wiglaf, who on the surface is Beowulf's friend and right-hand man. But he's also the only one who sees through the "legend" ("last time it was three [monsters that Beowulf killed]") and recognizes Beowulf as human. He's the only one who knows the real Beowulf. At the end, when Wiglaf's standing in the ocean, holding the horn and staring at a beckoning Grendel's mother, you're rooting for him to toss the horn aside and turn his back on her -- but his hesitation alone redeems Beowulf by suggesting that no man could have resisted Grendel's mother, even when he knew the destruction that would befall him if he succumbed.
Even Grendel and his mother aren't just stock "evil monsters". Grendel is driven to rage by the cacophany from Hrothgar's mead hall -- but you can't count him wholely blameless because his mother had forbade him from killing humans. His mother, for her part, was driven by her desire for a son, and was willing to hold up her part of the bargain. But if you broke the pact, all bets were off -- even if breaking the pact wasn't your fault.
Gaiman and Avary also added a lot of nice historical touches to the film. Anyone who's read the Norse sagas knows that heroic tales of that time had some pretty funny lines in them, and Beowulf keeps that tradition. ("You want me to go in there with you?" "No." "Good." Classic!) Using red ribbon to represent blood when Beowulf rips off Grendel's arm in the play re-enacting the battle was nice, too. Even something as subtle as using the scenes on Beowulf's crown to show a passage of time and a depiction of his triumphs brought in the craftsmanship of the period.
I expect some audiences to have problems with Unferth going so quickly from disliking Beowulf to pledging fealty to him. Typically in a movie if a character wants power and sees the hero as a threat to his plans, he either (a) plots against him for the entire film, only giving him something like his family's sword as a means to betray him later, or (b) only sees the errors of his ways and follows the hero after a major tramatic event -- like the hero saving him from falling off a cliff. But in the 6th century, when Beowulf was set, men were judged by their prowess as warriors. Just as losing a swimming race earned Beowulf Unferth's derision, defeating an enemy that Unferth couldn't gained him Unferth's respect and loyalty. "I couldn't beat him, but you did, so you're a better man than me." Although modern audiences not familiar with the history and culture might have a hard time wrapping their minds around that while watching Beowulf, I have to applaud Gaiman and Avary for staying true to the era.
There was only one part where I think they missed a good opportunity -- Wealthow's rescue after the dragon attack. I loved that it was Wealthow who knocked Ursula out of the way of the dragon's fireball. Women of that era were as strong and capable as their men; faced with danger, they couldn't stand around and wait for a man to rescue them. They had to take care of themselves. Wealthow rescuing Ursula illustrated that in one broad stroke.
But then, when Wealthow was dangling over the broken bridge, Ursula was unable to save her, and Wealthow was unable to save herself. Instead, like more modern tales, she had to rely on a man, Wiglaf, to do it. It's a minor thing, and I don't think the movie was worse for it. But I think showing Wealthow's strength, and the strength of self she teaches Ursula, by having Wealthow save herself would have made that part even better.
Like I said, a minor thing. And it was the only part of the script itself that disappointed me. And, yes, I'm nitpicking. Because there wasn't anything else wrong with it.
The Sum of the Parts, or the Whole?
Any part of Beowulf would have been good enough to make it a success at the box office. Excellent CG, amazing 3D, and a strong, well-scripted story. But the three combine to create an experience that is truly greater than the sum of its parts.
Watching the film, you forget about the animation, and the 3D, and get lost in a tale that comes to life on the screen. You forget the theater around you, the people in the seats beside you. And when the credits roll, all you can think is, "Wow!"
For a movie that transports you back in time to the Heroic Age, that makes the modern world fade away and makes you feel part of the action on the screen, you can't do better than Beowulf.