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Comic Con Teaser For BEOWULF Hits Online!!!
Hey folks, Harry here... The day before the BEOWULF presentation at Comic Con - I had the opportunity to check it out in REAL D's 3D. It is a bit overwhelming. First off - there's just the general feeling that I can't believe I'm watching an adult animated tale written by Neil Gaiman and Roger Avary... being directed by Robert Zemeckis -
I can't tell you how long I've wanted a brutal, sexy animated film that wasn't meant for the ones in the short pants. That it is our first epic tale of English literature - and is in 3D - well, that pitches the tent right where it needs to be.
But then there's the second thought - which is about the animation - It is gorgeous - a bit realistic - yet not. It was distracting to me for the first few minutes, but then something else happened entirely... I began getting caught up in the story - and when the sequence ended and this trailer played, I was a bit disappointed... not in the clip, but in the fact that I wasn't watching the entire thing.
As I just watched this Comic Con teaser in HD - I watched it thinking about the possibility of George Miller's JUSTICE LEAGUE being a 3D Animated/MoCap film... and I have to say - it has been my dream... for a very long time - to see a top notch animated Superhero tale that just went further than anything we've seen in live action. That said - I wonder if MARVEL, through their distribution deal with Paramount - won't mount the same type of production with their characters - or will they keep it live action?
I suppose a lot of this depends upon the success and/or failure of BEOWULF. It's a bold and risky step in a direction of Adult animation that our culture has been needing to take for quite some time.
Click Here For the HD
Click Here For The Other
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...meh
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that's it
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it'll be interesting to see how this turns out.
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I don't want them to know who I am!
How do they know that I faked my name-- How do they know who I am?! -
Bastards.
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"We're sorry, we were unable to verify your information at this time."
Verify!? from/with what? i punched in a legit us zip code, and a phony name/birtdate... is the site down? -
http://tinyurl.com/29a8m3
Looks sweet... The teaser and the book. -
Nice one ;-)
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All it reminds me of is 300.
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... just to see the lame-ass Beowulf teaser? Eff THAT!
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compress the shit out of them?
I really hope mocap is improved for avatar.
Looks like funk. -
I want to see the Blue Lady from Fifth Element going down on Peter North. Technology, don't let me down now!!!
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I actually put down my real name, and yet still got no content. Way to suck Beowulf.
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looks like a Diablo II segment.
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I'm British living in Germany - I just typed "New York zip codes" into Google, entered the first one I saw along with my real name and got access.
Snoop away NSA! -
This does look like a 'cutscene' from a PC game.
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john smith, 90210 feb 28 1981...that got me in
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I was underwhelmed by that theatrical trailer. And I was one of the few that thought "Beowulf and Grendel" starring Gerard Butler was great.
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Always works
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What the fuck does that mean?I tried using a fake name, but it wouldn't let me view it, so I put in my neighbors name and birthdate.... Did I just break some kinda new law?
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Do I need to remind you? This will bomb. Leave "adult animation" to the Japanese.
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Hi AIC, long time first time. My name IS Michael Bayowulf, but I also go by Daniel Glickman. And you can too. Someone really doesnt want people to access these restricted trailer sites, or at least people who aren't public figures. Glickman is Chairman for the MPAA, enter his information-
Daniel Glickman
20016
11/24/44
-and voila! Access granted. Another small victory for anonymity. -
That is laughably bad. Seriously.
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don't understand.
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It's exactly like the wax museum! Astounding!
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Aug 24, 2007 5:02:28 PM CDT
always kinda imagined Grendel lookin like Disneys BEAST
by george newman
with the cape and bows and everything.
But really;. I wanted a hairy, horn-headed guy. Not some Ghoulish burn victim -
As much as I love the Batman, Superman and Justice League animated series - they always show the limitations of their budgets. I'm talking top notch animation that blows away what we've seen in Disney theatrical. And in the CG - MoCap world they have the capacity to bring Alex Ross style art to life. That's what I've been dreaming of.
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its good to see some type comment from oone of you guys on this JLA thing.
Mo Cap CGI feels feels right if they wanna make it now.
If its live action its gonna spoil the Singer and Nolan pics for us geeks and confuse the hell out of non geeks, imo. -
Sorry if i spell shit wrong or ruin my word spacing in my posts, this shits tricky!!
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... this probably would have been good as live action.
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Alas, mine did not. Movie looks alright, I'll probably check it out.
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Trying to do a "CG Alex Ross film" using the Zemeckis Corpsemation™ technique would be fucking atrocious. It would be the equivalent of some talentless douche making an "Alex Ross comic" by tracing and painting over photos of his friends dressed up as Superman and Batman.
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There isn't a whole lot here. Like two bloody shots and the side of Jolie's ass. Scandalous! What's the point of a Redband trailer if you aren't going to show something worth the red band. The No Country redband trailer has a man getting shot through the head with compressed air. This has CGI ass. Um...
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I'm a pretty big fan of Gaiman's books, but his film work so far leaves me cold and from what I see of Beowulf, Gaiman won't be making any more films. Mirrormask and Stardust have bombed and so will Beowulf - it lacks that guts that 300 has. I agree with the other TB's that it looks like a video game.
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Has Mo-cap not improved one bit since Final Fantasy?? that looks embarrassing.
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A GIANT ZOMBIE with rubber arms? its terrible. and the dragon looked even worse.
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Watch the CG cutscenes in Marvel Ultimate Alliance on an XBOX 360 in HD to see what Harry is talking about.
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How come AOL got this scoop before AICN?
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Was that any different from this:
http://www.apple.com/trailers/paramount/beowulf/ -
It's one thing to have computer animated monsters but Robert Zemeckis couldn't find a cave that looked "just right?" Ray Winstone just didn't have the right look, even though the guy looks more like a viking in real life than that CGI He-Man wannabe? It would be one thing if my mind was getting blown with every shot and the whole time I was thinking, "They could never do this in real life," but no, this looks like an 80's "Conan" knock-off given a slight "Lord of the Rings" face-lift. The only thing that even gives me some small tidbit of hope is Neil Gaiman, although he's had his share of misses as well. Finally, I was excited at the prospect of George Miller doing a LIVE ACTION "JLA" movie, not this mo-cap nonsense. It's like they found the one thing that didn't need to be computer animated (actors) and decided to fix what wasn't broken. The other insidious part of this whole affair is that actors like Anthony Hopkins and Angelina Jolie now can play the same roles until the day they die and still look essentially the same.
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FAQwpzkxp_4
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That is what the justice league movie should be. At the very least have Alex Ross involved in the JLA film in some way.
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There are a lot of different types of animation and this just one of them. The story is wonderful and this animation makes it look more like a story book telling which is what it is.
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Aug 24, 2007 6:41:48 PM CDT
I still think this film could be awesome, but...
by judge dredds dirty undies
The trailers are fucking dire and the 28 days later music is wrong wrong wrong for this film, slap some Poledouris on there you fucking morons.
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Just saying
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It always looks like a video game to me. Give me live actors any day of the week.
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I've been fussing over the lack of any JLA news for the past couple of days. MoCap would give us the worlds we've always envisioned our heroes in - and I know that the movie is supposedly about the OMACs, but if anyone has read Alex Ross' 12-issue "Justice" series - THAT is the movie that should be made - HANDS DOWN.
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...but to be fair it's early early days of Mo-Cap. I really respect Zemeckis for taking on the technology, he's got the balls. I'm not a fan of Mo-Cap at the moment, but like I said - it's early days. In the future Mo-Cap will be great. I can remember the first computer animation I ever seen, it was shown before HONEY, I SHRUNK THE KIDS and I thought that sucked at the time. Hey, I was only 8 though. Look now at all the amazing stuff Pixar are doing, in the end Mo-Cap will be great. If i'm honest I was looking forward to BEOWULF, i'm not looking forward to it as much anymore, i'll still see it though because Zemeckis is one of my favourite directors and he's never ever disappointed me.
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leave to to zemeckis to always push the boundaries of special effects in filmmaking, can't wait to see the shots and sequences he comes up with for this film. damn, can't wait for this...and "there will be blood" and "no country for old men" although i haven't seen the new trailer announced on this site yet...
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And I don't see what the point of MoCap is right now. What is it advancing? It's only reason seems to be replacing actors, which, to me, sounds like the dumbest idea in the world. CGI has its place in imagining things that stop motion couldn't accomplish. Technicolor, Dolby digital...any technology you can think of...if it has endured, then its advanced the art. Things like 3D and Smell O Vision were gimmicks, which seems to be what MoCap is at the moment. It's not something you need...unless you're a filmmaker who just hates working with actors. But for my money, ONCE proves that there's nothing more emotional than two actors inhabiting their characters. And it proves you don't need all those bells and whistles to be the best damn film of the year.
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The extra bits definitely make this trailer 10 times better than the last one.
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That he's had to resort to this. Asking Harry to put a positive spin on this disaster of a movie. I know that everyone rips on Harry for selling out to the studios. I don't think it's nearly as intricate as some would like to think. But it's impossible for Harry to have befriended some of the most influential people in Hollywood and not be affected when he reports on them. I think this story is a perfect example. There is not one thing about this trailer/movie/production that has anything going for it. It's bland, it's boring, it's the anti "must see". And for them to beg Harry (or nudge him - whatever they did) to come on here and say a few positive things about the movie just to reserve some of the disastorous buzz is a pretty desperate move. But as most people who have read this site for a long time know, Harry will give you a few hints that he's not really telling the truth (read his review for "King Kong" to educate yourself on how he makes a movie that he only found okay sound like the greatest movie ever). The way he describes how when it was over he wanted to see more has the ring of someone desperately trying to find anything positive to say.
I mean come on. I can name ten video game cutscenes better than this trailer. Please ditch this whole motion-capture thing. It's worthless and adds nothing to the experience. This movie is DOA. -
Of course this may not conform to the Seamus Heaney translation from English 205 that I had to write a paper on.
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BRILLIANT! I was pissed for a second. lol
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This is the same trailer that hit a montha ago on apple... what's new?
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It's nothing new but it is just being employed in a much larger scale by Zemeckis. The thing that erks me is the whole photorealismn thing. Why couldnt the film have been more stylised and animated by hand? Save mocap for photoreal effects in live action, keep animation animated!
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What is the point of Mo-Cap? Is it to make a movie look like a video game? If that's the point, then this thing looks great.
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WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS SHIT ????? !!!!!
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Beowulf's character design looks bland. He's Blandwulf. Or Beobland. This 3D Beowulf is aiming for animated literature, and needs after-school foul grit and nastiness. If a CGI 'Den' feature gets made with bouncing boobs and flopping wieners galore, I am there. Unless they mo-cap Harry's manboobs to save money.
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if you really look at his work, it's not exactly impressive. it's good and even excellent but his artwork isn't exceptional. his work is different but it's not intellectually engaging and his range is limited. it makes me sad. james jean on the other hand -- to see his work in animated form would be phenomenal.
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cartoons anymore. That's great thinking. Make a grown up movie but make it a cartoon instead of for kids.
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Same voice.
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So the point is to restrict youngsters, yes?
I plug in my own, real, 37yo info.
Denied.
I plug in John Smith, some random date in 1981, and 90210...and I'm in.
Same thing happened last night with that Coen Bros flick. Hey movie web guys, your coding is for shit. Hire some real QA people or just drop the bullshit bogus age verification. -
Cameron wont emerge from seclusion with his strange brew until its good and potent.
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Beowulf was a hell of a read.
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She's still an actress I'd watch, but this voice over smacks of 'Alexander'.
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c'mon, you know she is getting really annoying
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CGI has a long way to go.
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WHY ARE NONE OF YOU CHUMPS CONCERED THAT THE GOVERNMENT WANTS TO KNOW ALL OF YOUR VITALS JUST TO WATCH A DUMBASS TRAILER FOR A DUMBASS MOVIE, TELL ME.
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...we all need to stand together on this, or it'll all be this way soon...and not just with movie trailers. You know it and I know it.
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It still looks too cut-sceney to me. You'd think they'd know by now the all-important lesson of CG animation: don't show a frame of it until it is 100% completed. And if this IS the final product, then this movie is probably gonna fall on its face. I am a huge Beowulf fan, but they've got me on the fence enough as it is with the "Grendelmilf" story tacked on. If this is the best motion capture animation they could manage, they shouldn't have bothered.
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If they want to knock JLA out of the park, here are the two names they need on board: Brad Bird and Alex Ross. Whether it was 2D, CG, or motion capture, that combination of talent would bring it hom.
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I just can't help but feel that people are just not that excited about this film. I think it would be alot more appealing to adults if it was live-action.
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They should have showed more action shots from the beginning. Like someone already said, the trailer isn´t that great but I think the film in 3d will be a big step in the right direction. Grendel looks awesome and so does the dragon. The only thing I wish they had done different is the art direction of the characters themeselves. They look too uninspired, can´t find a better word. I´m not talking about the quality of the animation or how realistic the eyes and lips look but how they were designed and dressed. Take Beowulf, he shouldn´t wear roman-looking clothes.
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Saw it again and it looks just too clean, not medieval enough. Just look at that cave. At least I hope that Beowulf and Jolie have some nice cgi fucking before he kills her, not just a little kiss. I might forgive Zemeckis the lack of detail if he turns up the maturity level.
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And FUCK Alex Ross, I seen better stuff in the scraps section at DeviantART. Luckily we already have a movie based on a great fantasy artists work. Fire and Ice ftw.
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I think not. Pffffffffffffffffft.
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Lets take the oldest form of narrative story, the epic poem and combine it withe the newest, cgi, it cant miss!!! How do these people have jobs? Zemeckis is like 2 for 20, BTF and Cast Away being the best, so why is he Spielberg all of a sudden?
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the 720p one doesn't ask you for anything.
As for the "liquid" it's not like it's supposed to be water or anything. She's using magic or whatever to dissolve the sword he stabbed her with in the other shot. -
I agree about mocap & 3d being used to accomplish what can't be done with live-action or stop-motion and so-on, and that this looks redundant SO-FAR (to be fair we've seen what 90 seconds?), especially with the mimicing the real actors' looks, but you seem to say the majority of mocap is useless and not being used for what it was designed for.
In actuality it's just the majority of Zemekis' films lately.
Even if you hate both films, King Kong and Happy Feet used mocap for all the right reasons, and both supplemented the mocap with a lot of keyframed stuff. But both films couldn't have been done with keyframing alone, or conversely couldn't have been completely motion-captured. Also, Gollum, while he was a human-like character, was impossible to pull off without making many sacrifices if done with traditional methods. The stylised face wouldn't have worked and he's impossibly skinny. Like Rick Baker says, you can add, but you can't take away. So maybe the track record isn't quite so bad in these early days. I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt here because we've only seen a few seconds, but it does seem ridiculous at this point. -
...WHY??
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Ass and tits at the end. And because it's uncanny valley CG, it's not arousing at all. That's the real feat Zemeckis pulled off, making a nude Angelina Jolie un-bonerific.
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but I'd rather see Timm's stylized stuff on the screen, not Ross's stiff, photorealistic drawings of his fugly friends dressed as DC heroes.
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You know it.
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Why can I freely see hardcore porn on the net, but I have to be verified by the US government to watch a trailer for a big-budget Hollywood movie? Oh, and AICN dudes, find out the real story on JLA/Superman instead of posting old news, thanks!
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After watching that trailer, I remain very skeptical about this project. I remember hearing some stuff based on early images that this mo-cap work was going to be pretty mind-blowing. But all I see are more glass-eyed creations that resemble decent actors. I think mo-cap work can be extremely effective when used in the right places (Gollum, Kong), but an entire cast of characters brought to life with mo-cap still signals a complete disregard for the job an actor is hired to do, if you ask me. The Anthony Hopkins character looks like a shoddy CG creation pretending to be Anthony Hopkins. It's distracting and annoying to watch. A big-budget Beowulf flick with live actors on the screen and a mo-cap Grendel would have been a cool idea. But the entire movie done in mo-cap is too much for me, personally. I hated The Polar Express and I see very little in the various trailers for this movie that makes me think this will be some great improvement. Plus, I fucking hate the Grendel design. When I read a translation of Beowulf many, many years ago, I thought how cool it would be to see a bad-ass version of Grendel brought to life on the big screen. This piece of shit creature looks like an oversized Gollum. I'd like this movie to work, but I remain worried and unconvinced.
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The CGI is probably still being "tweaked" as we speak. I've seen some amazing CGI lately, especially liquids like water that look like the HD version of Planet Earth from Discovery channel. I hope they've seen some amazing CGI lately too and make there's as good if not better, because what they have so far is still too CGI-ish, and not realistic.
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Blinking. I am completely serious. They need to put a sensor on the actors' EYELIDS as well as their other features. The right about of blinking and at the correct moments actually *sells* a performance on screen as truth. Anyone else agree? That's ONE thing right there that could help get us past the uncanny valley.
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i put a random actors name and birthday in there with a fake zip and it worked
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Am I wrong?
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Too cartoony. I guess they couldn't afford to motion capture horses like WETA did on LOTR. So they animated them by hand. The end result is bad. The people themselves have a creepy quality to them and that's what'll hurt this film, like most CGI movies. You're distracted by the visuals and never real get into the story.
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You don't have to put it your real name and info. This isn't the government, it's just Zemenkis being an idiot. Put in a fake name and DOB. If it doesn't work the first time, it will the 2nd or 3rd.I'm certainly not going to provide my REAL name and DOB to some website just because they tell me to.
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The oldest tale, done in the gimmickiest way possible, flat, dramatically insipid shite. And Roger Avary is a BAD writer. BAD. Not good. BAD. Fuck this. Really. Even Coraline deserved live action, not this expensive toyshow for half-blind Word of Warcraft eunuchs.
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I mean they're filming all the actors on greenscreens anyway - why not just go the LOTR route and make it cool!? The CG characters look way too weird!
Angelina still looks hot though!
Screencaps at http://tinyurl.com/2belrb -
i cant imagine being able to enjoy this film without being constantly reminded that is CG... the variances in the quality of the Virtual Actors will destroy any chances you have in suspending belief throughout the story. That was a major problem in both the Final Fantasy movie and the Polar Express and If the trailer for this is anything to go by then its a problem they havent remedied. I do understand what zemeckes is trying to acheive though... with each subsequent movie the quality does improve and in maybe five or six years time it maybe possible to produce entirely flawless movies that will not need expensive actors at all and only voice actors to achieve the same results at a fraction of the price of hiring Will Smith etc. I wonder if the actors and actresses who contribute to these movies are aware that they maybe selling out their own future acting careers... LOL
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That's probably what they mean. Its one of the earliest texts in Old English. Despite the Scandinavian origins its considered one the foundations of English literature.
I got an A on my paper. -
to think this looks any good. Please stop making these awkward, goofy motion capture movies. This movie might be interesting as a brilliantly computer enhanced animated 2D, remember where things were going with Disney in the early 90's? This kind of animation is just stupid looking.
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This looks like a bad game video from LAST decade. How utterly lame.
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What happened to Zemeckis? This is sad, this movie should not even be released, the teasers look like a joke, and the description as low quality video game graphics for today's standards is no exaggeration...along with the ridiculous plot changes, I have completely given up on this film, maybe i'll watch it on dvd since i probably won't have to wait very long before it's on the $3.50 rack at Wal Mart, $2.75 for the full screen version. What is sad is the opportunity missed, and I don't understand the point of making this pure CGI, nothing in the teasers conveys the tone or atmosphere I imagine when reading Beowulf...I got more of that sense in portions of certain scenes in THE FOUNTAIN when Jackman's character is fighting his way toward the tree of life, or scenes from Aliens, and even the Exorcist when Father Lankester Merrin and the suspense when he and others must face the demon....Beowulf is supposed to be full of suspense and terror, the enemy made so terrifying that the audience would feel fear for the hero that has to face it...if they couldn't get the mythological aspects right at the very least they should have erred on the side of practically being a horror film....this reminds me of Ralph Bakshi and the old failed experiment with rotoscope animation.
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