Beowulf
Saw Beowulf yesterday in Jordan Furniture’s 3-D IMAX theatre
in Reading. I quite liked it. I didn’t find the animation as distracting as others have claimed. While good, there’s clearly work to be done in that area: fingers strumming the lyre didn’t come off well at all, and the horse galloping was pretty lame. Other than that, the only thing I didn’t really like was the MTV jump cutting and the video game swooping they used from time to time, but that’s not exclusive to an animated film, that seems to be everywhere.
The film was good enough to make me want to go re-read the book to see how faithful it was, so I guess that’s saying something. It’s hard to take an oral saga and translate it to the screen. So much of the story is bound up with the speaker’s presentation, it’s hard (and perilous) to translate. I didn’t find the violence and gore to be all that much, frankly. Sin City was far more gory, as was Excalibur.
I don’t know that the 3-D added a whole lot, but the IMAX was great.
