[marchron]

Now for something completely different . . .

I had to sit and read all 13,000 pages of Beowulf in a pre-Shakespearean English Lit course, so I was anxious to finally be able to watch a movie version if for no other reason than as a half-decade-after-the-fact spitting in my professor's eyes.

Also, I wanted to see if the "performance capture" all-CGI technology had improved since The Polar Express. The good news: it has. The bad news . . . why the [censored] didn't they just do live-action? If Lord Of The Rings could be done, they could have done Beowulf. Grendel was basically Gollum, only bigger, uglier and more pissed off.

Making it live action would also have eliminated the need to get cute with some of the shots, especially during the end. Yeah, CGI allows directors to make fancy zooms and cuts that would be difficult or impossible in the real world, but there were way too much of them and it made me verge on the edge of motion sickness. And I just watched the regular version; if I'd been in an 3-D IMAX theater, someone would have been wearing my lunch and a $3 Diet Coke.

That said, I actually like the liberties the writers took with the original poem; it gave it more of a theme rather than just a story of Beowulf, the colossal badass.

I also would have preferred Sean Bean as the basis for Beowulf instead of Ray Winstone (Mr. French from The Departed), but the rest of the "cast" were quite brilliantly chosen.