I’ve come to Replace Your Actors’

Beowulf is a simple tale of man versus monster, and redemption for mistakes of the past. I never had to read the story in High School like most teenagers, but I was aware of it; so, I never even really new what the story was. I went to this film to get out of the house which had become a cave after several days of cold and rain, and I really wasn’t expecting much. Robert Zemeckis has made many a film I have enjoyed in the past, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Back to the Future, and even Forrest Gump, to name a few. But I kind of lost interest in his style with his past efforts What Lies Beneath and Cast Away over the past ten years or so. Zemeckis is back in top form with Beowulf – for one, making a very good suspenseful and a thrill ride of a movie, and also ushering in the new era of digital 3-D films.

Beowulf (Ray Winstone) is a warrior for hire so to say, who travels with a band of faithful warriors to a remote Danish Kingdom to slay a beast of incomprehensible horror. The Viking king Hrothgar (Anthony Hopkins) has had his kingdom under relentless attack from the demon creature Grendel (voiced by Crispin Glover), and is willing to pay any warrior handsomely to slay the beast. Grendel’s almost human like screams of pain and horror are as memorable as any classic call of a monster, most notably Godzilla. But soon, it is obvious with the introduction of Grendel’s mother (Angelina Jolie), that there is more to Grendel’s story than the king has revealed; and Beowulf will be just as much at battle with himself, as any beast that has come to battle with him before. Slaying the regular demon is easy; it is the personal ones that are the most difficult to excorcise is what I get out of this classic tale.

All I want from a film most of the time, is to take me somewhere else for a couple of hours; and boy does Beowulf do that. I don’t think that Zemeckis really was trying to make a movie that was trying to make a 100% replica its voice talent visually; the film does still have that animated feel. But there are many moments when looking at Grendel and the surrounding scenery that you feel transported to a place never seen before. I am unsure if the standard version of this film can achieve that ‘ that new feeling is possibly a result just from the 3-D format.

Just as Gollum was for the Lord of the Rings Trilogy, Grendel is one of the most memorable film monsters in years. One of the most memorable moments of the film was in a battle with Grendel, after many a Viking had been torn to pieces, as he bites the head off of a victim, and slowly chews it like a cow grazing on the farm. The image is obscured by a figure in the foreground, but the sound of crunching bones is enough to send chills up your spine. It makes it quite hard to figure out who to give credit to – the animators for making a monster so convincing, or the actor, Crispin Glover in this case, whose ‘costume’ exists in the digital realm. Needless to say, the film went by at a ferocious pace, and I was thoroughly entertained by the spectacle of it all. And I’ll be looking for it to win some special achievement awards coming up in the next few months.