Ahoy, squirts! Quint here with my impressions of reel 2 of BEOWULF in 3-D

They screened it tonight at the Horton Plaza… Neil Gaiman and Roger Avary presented it to a full theater tonight along with a longer, gorier trailer and the one that hit the net tonight.

You’ve seen the trailer. Imagine it in 3-D and you’ve seen what I’ve seen.

So, I’ll focus on the 20 minutes.

The story starts at the end of Beowulf’s fight with Grendel. I’m sure you’re familiar with the story (if you had to take English in high school, you had to read this), but if you don’t know it, then stop reading it here.

We get Beowulf doing a very primal yell of victory as he holds Grendel’s arm. The monster is trying to get out, but Beowulf screams out at him that he has been defeated by him, calling out his own name as he slams the door on the creature’s arm pit. Grendel’s arm falls to the ground, he howls in pain and slinks off into the snowy night.

Beowulf is butt-ass naked (he decides that this demon can’t be killed by any weapon made by man, so he strips of his armor and armory and fights him completely naked) as the hall calls out his victory.

This section had his genitalia being hidden like an AUSTIN POWERS scene. At one point it’s one of Grendel’s fingers in the extreme foreground, then it’s a helmet, a cup, etc. There was a split afterwards at to how campy this came off, but I thought it was a little distracting, but harmless. I realize they’re going for a PG-13 here and they can’t have Beowulf’s schlong waving around.

The King is awoken (Anthony Hopkins) and told the monster is defeated. At the same time, Grendel stumbles to a body of water where he meets his mother, a water demon, so even the shallow pool Grendel finds takes him to his mother (Angelina Jolie).

Now, this was by far my favorite part of this footage. You don’t see the water demon, nothing more than her hands, as she consoles her dying son. Crispin Glover as Grendel will be the master stroke in this film, I have no doubt. As he dies, he speaks to her… and it’s in this moment we get a piece of Glover’s work. The speech is in this weird half-Danish half-English dialogue. You get what he’s saying. He’s hurt. He’s dying. He takes comfort from his mother, who asks him calmly who did it. He utters an incomprehensible sentence before capping it with “Beowulf,” and then finally slumping, eyes dead.

Let’s talk about Grendel. He’s lumpy, cancerous. He’s obviously mutated. Very fleshy, disproportionate. I visited the production offices a while back and described this design. I love it. His face is mutated so badly his jaw is exposed, teeth sticking out. Yet, in his final moments he didn’t look unkind in a weird way.

Back to the grand hall, Beowulf is congratulated and given treasures.

If you go back and read my set visit report, you’ll see they let me shoot a scene and it was during this moment. I can’t be positive… but I swear to God one of my pieces of framing made it into the film.

The process had a digital world I could walk around with, monitors showing my progress in this world roughly animated. The King (Hopkins) gives a speech and gestures to Grendel’s arm mounted in the Hall. I shot this low, with Hopkins on the extreme right side of the frame, arm outstretched and Grendel’s limb fitting perfectly above his arm, next to his shoulder.

Now, the rest of this scene was nothing like I shot it, but I’m going to pretend that was my shot. Hehe

This sequence gave us good looks at Ray Winstone as Beowulf (doesn’t look a goddamn thing like him), Brendan Gleeson, Anthony Hopkins, John Malkovich and Robin Wright-Penn.

Another good moment is a nightmare Beowulf has as he’s visited by the vengeful demon mother who wants a child to replace the one taken from her. She appears to Beowulf as the Queen (Wright-Penn) and when he doesn’t take to her advances, a part of her demon being shows through and attacks. He awakes, screaming, to find that it was a nightmare. But then he sees that the bodies of the rest of the men in the hall… maybe 20 or 30… are strung up in the rafters. Pretty fucked up and gory.

He gets the story from the King, finds out about the Demon mother. Beowulf flips. “How many do I have to kill? Who’s next? The demon father, the demon brother, the demon aunt,” etc. Hopkins pretty much says that he has nothing to worry about from the demon’s father (insinuating it was he himself who sired Grendel) and Beowulf and Wiglaf (Gleeson) go in search for the monster.

This was a pretty beautiful scene as Beowulf along investigates a deep, magical cave. He’s slowly stalked by the demon mother until she reveals herself. When she appears to him, she slowly walks out of the water a naked Angelina Jolie. Liquid gold moves over her body, revealing all by the nipples and cootch (again, thank you PG-13). She seduces Beowulf, literally stroking his sword until it dissolves into a gooey puddle (nice imagery, yeah?), promises him his own kingdom, riches, fame… all he has to do sire her a child.

The animation didn’t look completely finished to me. It was a little inconsistent. For instance, Robin Wright-Penn never quite looked right to me. She was the most “video game cut scene” looking of the characters. I don’t know if it was just because he has such a detailed, brilliant face, but Hopkins was by far the best looking of the group.

For those worried about the eyes being dead, like in POLAR EXPRESS, then you have nothing to worry about. What is left is a little stiffness to the movements and some troubled mouth movements. Now, none of them are huge deals, but when you watch this movie you’re going to be so amazed at what they achieved for most of it, that any little thing that can break that illusion will stand out to you.

On the whole, it was beautiful. It might not be life-changing… but who knows? I’ll need to see it in context, but my major worry wasn’t the animation, design or color palate, but if the acting was going to feel stagey, since that’s how they shot the performance capture.

I guess I needn’t have been worried with such great actors, but even good actors can lose focus. Here, though, everybody was amazing. Like I said, I can’t wait to see more Crispin Glover as Grendel. So amazing.

The 3-D was well done. Again, not in your face, but giving everything a greater depth.

That’s it for my thoughts on the screening. Be back with more Con stuff… keep an eye peeled.

-Quint
quint@aintitcool.com