Psycho's Movie Reviews #240: BEOWULF (2007)

Beowulf is a 2007 3D computer-animated fantasy action film directed and co-produced by Robert Zemeckis, written by Neil Gaiman and Roger Avary and based on the Old English epic poem of the same name. Starring the voices of Ray Winstone, Anthony Hopkins, Robin Wright Penn, Brendan Gleeson, John Malkovich, Crispin Glover, Alison Lohman and Angelina Jolie, the film features human characters animated using live action motion capture animation, which was previously used in The Polar Express (2004) and Monster House (2006).

Produced by Zemeckis' ImageMovers and Shangri-La Entertainment, the film premiered at Westwood, Los Angeles on November 5, 2007 and was released theatrically in the United States on November 16, 2007 by Paramount Pictures, with Warner Bros. Pictures handling international distribution. The film received moderately positive reviews from critics, who complimented the visual effects, motion capture and voice acting whilst criticizing aspects of the interpretation of the poem. The film underperformed at the box office, having earned only $196.4 million on a $150 million budget.

Plot

In 507, the legendary Geatish warrior Beowulf travels to Denmark with his band of soldiers including his best friend Wiglaf to help King Hrothgar, who needs a hero to slay Grendel, a hideously malformed troll-like creature with appalling strength and cunning who attacked and killed many of Hrothgar's warriors during a celebration in the mead hall Heorot. Upon arriving, Beowulf becomes attracted to Hrothgar's wife Queen Wealtheow.

Beowulf and his men celebrate in Heorot to lure Grendel out. When the beast attacks, Beowulf decides to have an even fight and engages him unarmed and naked. During the fight, Beowulf discovers that Grendel has hypersensitive hearing and ruptures the creature's eardrum. Grendel shrinks in size and manages to escape only after Beowulf severs his arm, mortally wounding him. In thanks for freeing his kingdom from the monster, Hrothgar gives Beowulf his golden drinking horn, which commemorates Hrothgar's victory over the mighty dragon Fafnir.

In his cave, Grendel's mother swears revenge over his corpse. She travels to Heorot and slaughters Beowulf's men in the night. Hrothgar tells both Beowulf and Wiglaf that Grendel's mother is the last of the Demons. Hrothgar's adviser, Unferth, offers Beowulf his sword Hrunting to slay Grendel's mother. Beowulf and Wiglaf then travel to the demon's cave, where Beowulf enters alone and encounters the demon, who takes the form of a beautiful, gold-covered naked woman. He tries to kill her with Hrunting but fails due to her magic; instead, she seduces him with promises to make him king in exchange for the drinking horn and a son to replace Grendel, which Beowulf agrees to when they both kiss.

Afterwards, Beowulf returns to Heorot with Grendel's head and announces he has killed his mother the demon. He recounts embellished stories of a fight, claiming he left the sword impaled in the body of Grendel's mother and lost the golden drinking horn in the battle. Hrothgar speaks to Beowulf privately, and asks if he truly killed Grendel's mother. Despite Beowulf's boasting and calling Grendel's mother a 'hag', Hrothgar is not fooled and indirectly reveals he had been seduced by the demon, and Grendel was the result of their tryst. Hrothgar says all that matters is that Grendel is dead and the curse of Grendel's mother is no longer his to bear. Beowulf then realizes that the curse had been passed unto him after his affair with the demon. Hrothgar declares Beowulf to be king upon his death and he then commits suicide by jumping from the castle parapet onto the beach below. Grendel's mother appears as a gold light in the surf, and drags Hrothgar's corpse into the sea as the crowd kneels to King Beowulf.

Years later, the elderly Beowulf is the estranged husband of Wealtheow, who has converted to Christianity. Beowulf has a mistress, Ursula, but his tryst with Grendel's mother has left him sterile to both his wife and mistress. On the anniversary of Beowulf's victory against Grendel, Unferth returns the golden drinking horn, which his slave had found on the moors. That night, a nearby village is destroyed by a dragon, which then transforms into a golden figure, who orders Unferth to give a message to King Beowulf, the dragon's father: the sins of the father have returned to him (referencing the Faustian bargain curse cycle, which Wealtheow knows about). Afterwards, Beowulf privately confesses to Wealtheow about his affair with Grendel's mother and asks her forgiveness.

Beowulf and Wiglaf go to the cave once again, and Beowulf enters alone. When Grendel's mother appears, Beowulf throws her the golden horn, but she refuses it and the dragon attacks Beowulf's castle, threatening Wealtheow and Ursula. Despite his age, Beowulf goes to great lengths to stop the dragon, slicing off his own arm in the process. Eventually, he kills the dragon by ripping its heart out, and he and the creature tumble to the rocky beach below the castle. The dragon transforms into its golden humanoid form, before being washed out to sea. Before he dies, Beowulf tries to tell Wiglaf the truth about his affair with Grendel's mother and acknowledge his son, but Wiglaf insists on keeping his legacy intact.

As the new king, Wiglaf gives Beowulf a Norse funeral. Wiglaf finds the golden horn in the sand and sees Grendel's mother give Beowulf a final kiss as his burning ship sinks into the sea. Grendel's mother slowly rises to the water's surface and seductively beckons Wiglaf towards her. He wades into the sea, while holding the golden drinking horn, before pausing halfway in the surf. They both stare at each other, the Demon seductively waiting and Wiglaf clearly tempted.

Production

Development

Author Neil Gaiman and screenwriter Roger Avary wrote a screen adaptation of Beowulf in May 1997 (they had met while working on a film adaptation of Gaiman's The Sandman in 1996 before Warner Bros. cancelled it). The script had been optioned by ImageMovers in the same year and set up at DreamWorks with Avary slated to direct and Robert Zemeckis producing. Avary stated he wanted to make a small-scale, gritty film with a budget of $15–20 million, similar to Jabberwocky or Excalibur. The project eventually went into turnaround after the option expired, to which the rights returned to Avary, who went on to direct an adaptation of The Rules of Attraction. In January 2005, producer Steve Bing, at the behest of Zemeckis who was wanting to direct the film himself, revived the production by convincing Avary that Zemeckis' vision, supported by the strength of digitally enhanced live-action, was worth relinquishing the directorial reins. Zemeckis did not like the poem, but enjoyed reading the screenplay. Because of the expanded budget, Zemeckis told the screenwriters to rewrite their script, because "there is nothing that you could write that would cost me more than a million dollars per minute to film. Go wild!" In particular, the entire fight with the dragon was rewritten from a talky confrontation to a battle spanning the cliffs and the sea.

Animation and Visual Effects

Zemeckis drew inspiration for the visual effects of Beowulf from experience with The Polar Express, which used motion capture technology to create three-dimensional images of characters. Appointing Jerome Chen, whom Zemeckis worked with on The Polar Express, the two decided to chart realism as their foremost goal.

Animation supervisor Kenn MacDonald explained that Zemeckis used motion capture because "Even though it feels like live action, there were a lot of shots where Bob cut loose. Amazing shots. Impossible with live-action actors. This method of filmmaking gives him freedom and complete control. He doesn't have to worry about lighting. The actors don't have to hit marks. They don't have to know where the camera is. It's pure performance." A 25 × 35-foot stage was built, and it used 244 Vicon MX40 cameras. Actors on set wore seventy eight body markers. The cameras recorded real-time footage of the performances, shots which Zemeckis reviewed. The director then used a virtual camera to choose camera angles from the footage which was edited together. Two teams of animators worked on the film, with one group working on replicating the facial performances, the other working on body movement. The animators said they worked very closely on replicating the human characters, but the character of Grendel had to be almost reworked, because he is a monster, not human.

Over 450 graphic designers were chosen for the project, the largest team ever assembled for a Sony Pictures Imageworks-produced movie as of 2007. Designers at Imageworks generated new animation tools for facial, body and cloth design especially for the movie, and elements of keyframe animation were incorporated into the film in order to capture the facial expressions of the actors and actresses. The mead hall battle scene near the beginning of the film, among others, required numerous props that served as additional markers; these markers allowed for a more accurate manifestation of a battlefield setting as the battle progressed. However, the data being collected by the markers slowed down the studios' computer equipment and five months were spent developing a new save/load system that would increase the efficiency of the studios' resources. To aid in the process of rendering the massive quantities of information, the development team used cached data. In the cases that using cached data was not possible, the scenes were rendered using foreground occlusion, which involves the blurring of different overlays of a single scene in an attempt to generate a single scene film.

Other elements of the film were borrowed from that of others created by Imageworks: Spider-Man 3 lent the lighting techniques it used and the fluid engine present in the Sandman, while the waves of the ocean and the cave of Grendel's mother were modelled after the wave fluid engine used in Surf's Up. The 2007 film Ghost Rider lent Beowulf the fluid engine that was used to model the movements of protagonist Johnny Blaze. Jerome Chen worked to process large crowd scenes as early as possible, as additional time would be needed to process these scenes in particular. As a result, the film's development team designed a priority scale and incorporated it into their processors so graphic artists would be able to work with the scenes when they arrived.

So much data was produced in the course of the creation of the film, the studio was forced to upgrade all of its processors to multicore versions, which run quicker and more efficiently. The creation of additional rendering nodes throughout Culver City, California was necessitated by the movie's production. Mark Vulcano, who had previously worked on VeggieTales and Monster House, served as Senior Character Animator for the film.

In designing the dragon, production designer Doug Chiang wanted to create something unique in film. The designers looked at bats and flying squirrels for inspiration, and also designed its tail to allow underwater propulsion. As the beast is Beowulf's son with Grendel's mother, elements such as Winstone's eyes and cheekbone structure were incorporated into its look. The three primary monsters in the film share a golden colour scheme, because they are all related. Grendel has patches of gold skin, but because of his torment, he has shed much of his scales and exposed his internal workings. He still had to resemble Crispin Glover though: the animators decided to adapt Glover's own parted hairstyle to Grendel, albeit with bald patches.

Zemeckis insisted that the character Beowulf resemble depictions of Jesus, believing that a correlation could be made between Christ's face and a universally accepted appeal. Zemeckis used Alan Ritchson for the physical model, facial image and movement for the title character of Beowulf. Avary had the idea to make Beowulf fight Grendel naked as a reference to Richard Corben's comic book Den, while also taking inspiration from legendary berserkers, who purportedly fought in battles while naked.

Music

The music for Beowulf was composed and conducted by Alan Silvestri. A soundtrack was released November 20, 2007. Silvestri was largely responsible for the production of the soundtrack album, although actresses Robin Wright Penn and Idina Menzel performed several songs in the soundtrack's score.

Differences from the Poem

One objective of Robert Zemeckis, Neil Gaiman and Roger Avary was to expand on the original poem as it has been recorded. Beowulf is generally considered to be a pagan tale written down by Christian monks, which for Zemeckis and Avary represented the possibility that the original story had been tampered with in order to better fit Christian sensibilities. They found this to be a reasonable explanation for critical elements to the story that are absent from the poem, such as the identity of Grendel's father, why he abstains from attacking Hrothgar, and the lack of proof that Grendel's mother had been slain.

In order to restore those points, they offered their own interpretation for motivations behind Grendel's behaviour and for what happened in the cave of Grendel's mother, justifying it by arguing that Beowulf acts as an unreliable narrator in the portion of the poem in which he describes his battle with Grendel's mother. Avary said their goal was "to remain truer to the letter of the epic but to read between the lines and find greater truths that had been explored before," while Gaiman commented, "the glory of Beowulf is that you are allowed to retell it" due to the presence of many other adaptations that offered their own take on it.

These choices also helped them to better connect the third act to the second of their screenplay, which is divided in the poem by a 50-year gap.

Some of the changes made by the film as noted by scholars include:

• The portrayal of Beowulf as a flawed man

• The portrayal of Hrothgar as a womanizing alcoholic

• The portrayal of Unferth as a Christian

• The portrayal of Grendel as a sickly-looking childlike creature (somewhat similar to Tolkien's Gollum character), rather than a savage demon monster

• Beowulf's funeral

• The portrayal of Grendel's mother as a beautiful seductress, more of a succubus rather, who bears Grendel as Hrothgar's child and the dragon as Beowulf's child (this is also the case in the plot of the 1999 film Beowulf, with the exception that the dragon is entirely absent there).

• The fact that Beowulf becomes ruler of Denmark instead of his native Geatland.

This is not the first time that the theme of a relationship between Beowulf and Grendel's mother was explored by Gaiman. In his 1998 collection of short stories, Smoke and Mirrors, the poem Bay Wolf is a retelling of Beowulf in a modern-day setting. In this story, Beowulf as the narrator is ambiguous about what happened between Grendel's mother and himself.

The film has been acknowledged to draw extensively from the philosophy of Freud, Kristeva, Lacan and Jung, as well as Žižek. In particular, the portrayal of Grendel and his kin appeals to multiple forms of sexual unease, among them the castration anxiety, the monstrous feminine and the challenging of traditional gender roles. According to Nickolas Haydock, the film reflects the "American obsession with sex as the root of all evils," to the extent to compare Beowulf's and Hrothgar's portrayals to Bill Clinton and the history of sexual misconduct that caused his political decline. Nadine Farghaly also argues the story makes the point that unbridled desire only causes ruin.

Grendel's mother is represented in the film as a castrating, monstrous female who threatens masculinity. While Beowulf embodies phallic power through his physical strength, recurrent nudity and usage of a sword, all those prove useless against her, as she symbolically emasculates him by subsuming his phallus into the feminine power. This is metaphorized by Beowulf being seduced in her womb-like cave, where his sword strike magically fails at harming her body. After copulating with Grendel's mother, both Hrothgar and Beowulf find themselves unable to maintain fulfilling sexual relationships with Wealtheow or other women, becoming aged, bitter and even feminized in their impotency. In turn, Grendel's mother remains immortal and young, and through her offspring she proves capable to wield herself the robbed phallus. Grendel and the dragon act as extensions of her will, "mindless embodiments of feminine aggressiveness" who represent their fathers' emasculation and loss of patriarchal power.

Later Beowulf claims to have vanquished the mother, having supposedly rendered her dead with his sword in her cave, but the falsity of this only translates as a wishful, pretended triumph of the male over the female. His defeat to her, as well as his bargain for prestige and glory, transmits that male power "not only comes from the feminine, but remains eternally subject to it." However, authors have noted that he ultimately breaks the Oedipian triangle caused by his destructive son, as he manages to kill the dragon and seemingly thwart the cycle at the cost of his life. This has been interpreted as a last exaltation of masculinity, electing to die in self-sacrifice rather than living in his impotent, feminized state. He refers to himself as already "dead long time ago" in a previous scene. The film still underline the irresistibility of female power, as even Wiglaf, who had been shown to be abstinent from lust in contrast to his partners, is hinted to be similarly seduced by Grendel's mother.

The film contrasts those points to the original poem, using the "postmodern techniques of metatextuality and deconstruction". Whereas in the poem the heroic values of ancient warrior culture is reaffirmed, in the film it is shown to be in decline, even explicitly failing along with Beowulf. In the film, the character laments the old, heroic pagan religion is being replaced by Christianity, "leaving humankind with nothing but weeping martyrs, fear, and shame." In the poem Beowulf slays Grendel's mother and defeats her challenge on gender roles, but her film version is victorious over him, also using seduction instead of strength, which updates the ways in which the story views female power. The gold covering her skin and the Faustian bargain she offers embody similar modern views on the relationship between wealth and sex, particularly societal compulsions to enjoy them at the fullest, "not prohibited but demanded, which becomes a postmodern variation of Freud's death wish".

However, the main difference from the poem is portraying Beowulf as a flawed hero destroyed by his own negative qualities, like lust for power and unchecked male desire, which raises questions about the morality underlying heroism. Despite the superficial characterization of the Water Demons as Others, the film blurs the line between heroes and monsters, as Grendel can talk, and the dragon's human form resembles Beowulf himself, representing his repressed wishes. In turn, Beowulf and Hrothgar are rendered impotent just like Grendel, who lacks genitalia altogether, and then Beowulf ends up losing an arm like Grendel does. At the end, although the men from the film pretend to be champions against demonkind, they are ultimately revealed to be only its very originators.

Release/Reception/Box Office

At Comic-Con International in July 2006, Gaiman said Beowulf would be released on November 22, 2007. The following October, Beowulf was announced to be projected in 3D in over 1,000 theatres for its release date in November 2007. The studios planned to use 3D projection technology that had been used by Monster House (another motion-captured animated film that Zemeckis was involved on, but only as an executive producer), Chicken Little and the 3D re-release of The Nightmare Before Christmas, but on a larger scale than previous films. Beowulf would additionally be released in 35mm alongside the 3D projections.

Originally, Columbia Pictures (which also distributed Monster House) was set to distribute the film, but Steve Bing did not finalize a deal and instead arranged with Paramount Pictures for North American distribution and Warner Bros. for international distribution. Beowulf was also set to premiere at the 2007 Venice Film Festival, but was not ready in time. Instead, the film's world premiere was held in Westwood, Los Angeles on November 5, 2007.

Critics and even some of the actors expressed shock at the British Board of Film Classification rating of the film—12A—which allowed children under twelve in Britain to see the film if accompanied by their parents. Angelina Jolie called it "remarkable it has the rating it has", and said she wouldn't be taking her own children to see it. In the United States, the Motion Picture Association of America gave the film a PG-13 rating for "intense sequences of violence including disturbing images, some sexual material and nudity".

On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, Beowulf has received an approval rating of 71% based on 197 reviews, with an average score of 6.5/10. The website's consensus reads, "Featuring ground-breaking animation, stunning visuals, and a talented cast, Beowulf has in spades what more faithful book adaptations forget to bring: pure cinematic entertainment." On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 59 out of 100 based on 35 reviews, indicating "mixed or average reviews". Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "B−" on an A+ to F scale.

Giving Beowulf three out of four stars, Roger Ebert commented that the film is a satire of the original poem. Time magazine critic Richard Corliss described the film as one with "power and depth" and suggested that the "effects scenes look realer [sic], more integrated into the visual fabric, because they meet the traced-over live-action elements halfway. It all suggests that this kind of a moviemaking is more than a stunt. By imagining the distant past so vividly, Zemeckis and his team prove that character capture has a future." Corliss later named it the 10th-best film of 2007. Rolling Stone critic Peter Travers praised the motion capture used in the film and argued that "The eighth-century Beowulf, goosed into twenty-first century life by a screenplay from sci-fi guru Neil Gaiman and Pulp Fiction's Roger Avary, will have you jumping out of your skin and begging for more... I've never seen a 3-D movie pop with this kind of clarity and oomph. It's outrageously entertaining."

Tom Ambrose of Empire gave the film four out of five stars. He wrote that Beowulf is "the finest example to date of the capabilities of this new technique Previously, 3D movies were blurry, migraine-inducing affairs. Beowulf is a huge step forward Although his Cockney accent initially seems incongruous Winstone's turn ultimately reveals a burgeoning humanity and poignant humility." Ambrose also argues that "the creepy dead eyes thing has been fixed." Justin Chang of Variety thought that the screenwriters "have taken some intriguing liberties with the heroic narrative the result is, at least, a much livelier piece of storytelling than the charmless Polar Express." He also stated that "Zemeckis prioritizes spectacle over human engagement, in his reliance on a medium that allows for enormous range and fluidity in its visual effects yet reduces his characters to 3-D automatons. While the technology has improved since 2004's Polar Express (particularly in the characters' more lifelike eyes), the actors still don't seem entirely there."

Kenneth Turan of NPR criticized the film, writing: "It's been 50 years since Hollywood first started flirting with 3-D movies, and the special glasses required for viewing have gotten a whole lot more substantial. The stories being filmed are just as flimsy. Of course Beowulf does have a more impressive literary pedigree than, say, Bwana Devil. But you'd never know that by looking at the movie. Beowulf's story of a hero who slays monsters has become a fanboy fantasy that panders with demonic energy to the young male demographic." Manohla Dargis of The New York Times compared the poem with the film, stating that "If you don't remember this evil babe from the poem, it's because she's almost entirely the invention of the screenwriters Roger Avary and Neil Gaiman and the director Robert Zemeckis, who together have plumped her up in words, deeds and curves. These creative interventions aren't especially surprising given the source material and the nature of big-studio adaptations. There's plenty of action in Beowulf, but even its more vigorous bloodletting pales next to its rich language, exotic setting and mythic grandeur."

Beowulf ranked #1 in the United States and Canada box office during its opening weekend date of November 18, grossing $27.5 million in 3,153 theatres.

At the end of its theatrical run, the film had grossed an estimated domestic total of $82,280,579 and a foreign box office total of $114,113,166 for a worldwide gross of $196,393,745.

Budget $150 million

Box office $196.4 million

My Review

Robert Zemeckis and his Imagemovers team and CGI people and 'motion-capture' folks have turned out another following the Polar Express in 2004: once again the technique of a fully realized animated feature wrapped around real-actors performing only animated over. It's a little like a mix-and-match method of Who Framed Roger Rabbit, only this time with Toontown completely bleeding over LA. Speaking of bleeding over, Beowulf is not the kind of movie that will work well for the wee kiddies, the ones who maybe just have gotten a taste of Lord of the Rings; despite the PG-13, had it been animated by someone else like Ralph Bakshi, it would definitely get an R. While not on the same level of relentless video-game violence of 300, Beowulf does contend to bring in a similar contingent of an audience, while also likely alienating many who might have loved the original epic poem in the murky middle-English text. Transformed into a tale of a flawed monster killer who keeps on reminding us over and over "I-AM-BEOWULF!" as he ascends into a position of total power as a living legend, Roger Avary and Neil Gaiman leave it more as a director's film, making little moments of nuance and strength in the epic action-movie sort of way.

To be fair, Beowulf isn't very complex, which is just as well for many of the people who will go see it. There's also not much intended humour either, albeit somewhere in the similar ballpark of unintended laughs as 300 (if, perhaps, with a slightly better filmmaker at the helm). Story: Beowulf (Winstone, who's voice is about as commanding as imaginable) is called by a Danish king (Hopkins) to slay Grendel, a man-monster living in a mountain, who comes down to demolish all the people in his path based on noise vibrations that tick him off. He does slay the beast, and when Grendel's mother finds out, she goes also on a rampage of some slaughter. When Beowulf goes to confront her, he knocks her up (and why not when it's portrayed by a consistently nude Angelina Jolie), and she bears a son (not quite) unbeknownst to him. Then his son is born as a dragon, who also as Beowulf is an old king ravages the town. Take 3!

In-between this there isn't much else story, save for a tiff between Beowulf and Malkovich's character, and some allusions to adultery in the King's marriage to the Queen (colour us shocked). The reason to watch the film isn't for it's poetry in language, anyway, but for the rip-roaring sensationalism of the piece visually, as a kind of pop-art throwback to both folklore and video-games of the present. Luckily, Zemeckis has gotten rid of the "dead-eyes" syndrome that plagued the Polar Express. It doesn't mean from time to time the characters come off a little wooden, even if it is behind layers and layers of silicon detail. What works best is seeing Zemeckis and his technical team make it as something of a marvel: when watching the shot where it pulls back all the way through the village, through the woods, and to the mountain and cave where Grendel groans in agony, the shot and the audio of the dissipating banging and singing in the King's hall makes as much of a stand-out as anything in Zemeckis's arsenal.

Add to this the imagination in the fantasy elements: Grendel is one of the great creations in the realm of computer animation, right up there with Gollum and the new-and-improved Yoda; he's an abomination, with no skin and lots of deformities all very close up in 3-D, but there's a very real human quality to him too, tortured and retarded, led on by the (as a contrast) slick, golden, and attractive mother. Then back to the dragon in the climax, who is a combination of all three, and even if somehow the dragon doesn't quite work as well as Grendel, it comes close. As a piece of drama, it leans towards the silly and pompous, including a five-minute fight sequence where the animators avoid an R with the dreaded shot of Beowulf's crotch. As a piece of skilfully controlled work of eye-popping manoeuvring, it almost completely makes up for the flaws in the material. It's a must-see in the sense that you should see it on a big screen, with the glasses, and as close as possible. How it is with flesh and blood characters is just so-so. 8.1/10