A film that has everything working against it, Bamf tells you why.
Bamf here rematerializing from the void..
Beowulf has a story that is 5 years too late, and makes use of technology that is 20 years too early. The old English poem adapted for screen about a monster named Grendel that terrorizes freshmen high school students through mandatory reading assignments in our present day. I screened Beowulf at the illustrious Arclight in Hollywood as midnight fell. It was a packed house of film goers eager to place their 3D glasses on and wait for a spectacle, quietly wondering in the back of their minds if their equilibrium would hold up past the first act. The stereoscopic imagery is the best done to date, but does not a good film make.
3D is a gimmick. It’s a visual way to play with the audience that works best as a 10 minute ride in a theme park. In my travels I have been an able to take in various types of this immersive experience. To give you an idea of what I have seen, The Star Trek experience in Las Vegas (Borg 4-D), Shrek 4-D and Terminator 3-D at Universal Studios, Superman Returns at an Imax here in southern California, and Archie comics with the ol red and blue specs respectively. Out of those the Borg 4D offering in Vegas was the best, Archie the worst only because they never quite captured Betty’s endowments (but I have a penchant for blondes). When you take the 3D element out of Beowulf, you are left with mediocre CG characters that have been done better in the Shrek films, and a stylized war story that will forever be second to 300.
Beowulf, who has a feverish desire to remove his shirt like Matthew McConahey at a Hawaiian Tropics expo, should have been green lit as an R rated film. This is not a film for your children, 3D or otherwise. The opening sequence when Grendel eviscerates the great hall is the most violent ten minutes of film Zemeckis has ever done, and is how you wish the scene from Episode II when Anakin slaughters the Sandpeople would have been. The American rating system is completely backwards and reform is paramount today. Beowulf chooses to fight Grendel in the nude, as that is how the monster will face him. This makes sense in service to the story as it adds a bit of honor to Beowulf’s quest. But what you get from this need to hide the title character’s Johnson is a sequence that mirrors the end of the first Austin Powers movie, with candle sticks, odd mist, and a half-off frame character’s arm blocking the package. Now I’m in no way advocating more penis’ in American cinema, in fact after seeing Frank Langellas member the other day in the pretentious Starting Out in the Evening, I have had my fill (and frankly for a 3D film I expect far more cleavage shots, and I don’t care about Angelina, each film she does she comes closer to resembling the Queen from Aliens). A battle scene is not prurient in nature. If the big B was engaged in sexual activity I would understand not showing the jumblies, but this is not the case. Since we have a scene full of violence that cannot show full frontal nudity of a computer generated male then my guess is the raters associate violence with sex, and what a commentary on our current system of rating that is. You can get an R rating for a character that lights up a cigarette, but men being ripped in half and beaten with their own limbs…send it to the kids!
The term “spectacle” will be associated with Beowulf for some time, and if you have the availability I do encourage you to see it in 3D so you can understand why one could live without it. It is a film that will play like a 5 second fuse in your head, rather than a 78 hour candle long after you have turned your glasses back in. Here is what the studios that finance this sort of tech, and the directors that push it need to understand. A gimmick will not bring the box office numbers up. The public does not want immersive entertainment; they want stories that are immersive in content. I think James Cameron gets this but he himself is a big pusher for 3D. Titanic would not have made the impact that it did if it was just another A Night to Remember with a big boat sinking at the end. Perhaps I am all wrong on this. This may be the division of my age from youth like the baby boomer who doesn’t understand why one would want to watch TV shows on a computer. When I am proven wrong, is when good writers are appropriately paid, and the immersive experience no longer requires any sort of extra appendage during, or aspirin after.
In closing, Beowulf will burn bright like iron ferrite, then slip away into a footnote of cinema like the camp attempts at 3D in the 50’s-60’s era. The story was already outdone years before by the likes of Jackson and his vision of Lord of the Rings and more recently, as well as more comparatively Snyder’s 300. Though I will say the story of Beowulf will see a resurgence of glory in renaissance fairs all over greater Vermont, but otherwise, who cares?