DVDFile

Paramount Pictures Home Entertainment / 2007 / 114 Minutes / G
Street Date: February 26, 2008

Writer, producer, and director Robert Zemeckis is no stranger to motion capture and computer animation. He directed Polar Express, capturing Tom Hanks and the rest of the cast on a ten by ten foot motion capture stage. He then had the characters rendered as photo-realistically as he considered suitable for the fantasy material. When he produced Monster House, he also applied motion capture to give the purely imaginary characters an organic feel.

As you are no doubt aware, motion capture is a technique for which performers are dressed in form-fitting jumpsuits on which small, spherical, infrared (IR) reflectors have been placed. They are illuminated with infrared and perform in front of an array of IR cameras that capture the real-time positions of all the reflectors. That information is used by a computer to generate the motions of the characters. Even faces have dozens of small reflectors to capture the performers’ expressions. For this shoot, a larger capture area was used, more sensors were affixed to the actors, and a telemetry package that sent eye muscle data was employed. The result is a step toward greater realism, or perhaps I should write greater credibility, for some of the onscreen characters and actions are pure fantasy.

It could be argued that Beowulf could not be filmed any other way. The mythical creatures are so intimately integrated into the action that it would have been a technical nightmare to blend live action and CGI. This is the story of a legendary hero and his exploits of fifteen hundred years ago, reimagined for the big screen.

Danish King Hrothgar (Anthony Hopkins) has a problem. A powerful ogre called Grendel (Crispin Glover), twice the height of his largest warrior, invades the tribe’s mead hall to maim and kill. Hrothgar seems oddly immune; he challenges the beast, but rather than attack the king, Grendel flees, leaving the village to clean blood off floors, walls, and ceilings, and to mourn their dead.

Unbidden comes a self-proclaimed Thane hero and his band of warriors from across the sea, Beowulf (Ray Winstone). He explains that he’s heard of the king’s problem and that he’s come to kill the monster. This evokes great hope in the king, skepticism in the tribe’s highborn Unferth (John Malkovich), admiration and fear in the king’s unwilling bride, Wealthow (Robin Wright Penn), and no small concern in Beowulf’s second in command, Wiglaf (Brendan Gleeson).

Beowulf’s confrontation with Grendel’s will have a lasting impact on his life and the fates of Hrothgar’s subjects. There are dark secrets buried hidden from view, secrets that will be shared and experienced by Hrothgar’s heir. Beowulf will confront Grendel, and as a consequence, will have to confront yet another monster, Grendel's Mother (Angelina Jolie). She is loathsome demon capable of shape shifting, and one of the film’s failures is not revealing her motives, other than pure evil contrariness.

Like Lord of the Rings, Beowulf represents the end of an age, the end of a time of monsters and heroes. But unlike Lord of the Rings, this is a tale of the rise, fall, and redemption of a great hero.

The recreation of photorealistic CGI characters is getting better, but isn’t quite there yet. (And the site of an essentially nude computer generated Angelina Jolie is a bit bizarre; I hesitate to speculate what the CGI artists might have done with that computer character in their spare time.) Despite the organic nature of motion capture, there are scenes and sequences during which the physics of motion don’t feel quite right. The horses in particular don’t have a realistic gallop, despite the animals’ being motion captured. It’s likely due to the capture stage being too small for the horses to reach a realistic speed. Since the production is clearly CGI, the director takes liberties with camera shots that could not possibly have been done physically. And some are associated with the film’s being released in 3-D.

A pike extending toward the audience, a flight though the tops of trees, body parts being slung toward camera, a threatening flagpole about to impale our hero… you’ll find many such examples. And one of my biggest disappointments is that the 3-D version of this production and the 3-D Polar Express have yet to be released. As I’ve written before, HD discs and HD-ready displays are ideal for full-color 3-D presentations, needing only synchronized LCD shuttered glasses to complete the illusion.

Zemeckis is committed to two or three more 3-D CGI features. His A Christmas Carol is due in 2009; is that the next? James Cameron is working on Avatar, also reported to be shot in 3-D. A Nightmare Before Christmas was rereleased in 3-D. And let’s not forget George Lucas’ expressed interest in having the six Star Wars films converted to 3-D. I can only hope that behind the scenes, there are serious plans afoot to bring full color 3-D to home theater in high defintion.

The Video: How Does The Disc Look?

The film’s theatrical aspect ratio of 2.35:1 is presented in a great looking high definition transfer that I’m pleased to report was compressed with the AVC video CODEC. Alas, we’re still facing the limitations of the bit rate and storage capacity of HD DVD, so even though the images are very pleasing indeed, I suspect the original renderings have greater finely grained detail. Arrows launched against a dragon have thin shafts that are no more insubstantial than the outlines of the animated characters in Paprika; and yet, in the latter’s Blu-ray Disc, the black lines are sharper and better defined. Small object detail is excellent, as is the color rendition, and the video dynamic range. You’ll find some black crush that masks shadow detail, but based on the moods of those sequences, I suspect the look was intentional. The lighting is described by the director in one of the supplements; there are three modes: the overcast gray of northern latitudes; fire light that casts an orange glow; and, the cold, blue iridescence of algae in the waters of the demon’s cave. Each is conveyed convincingly.

The Audio: How Does The Disc Sound?

The Dolby Digital Plus 5.1 is quite good. The outstanding element is Alan Silvestri’s bombastic and testosterone-laden score, replete with a large chorus, a large symphonic orchestra, and a considerable percussion section. The dialog isn’t quite as clean as it could have been with a more advanced lossless track. I own the score CD, and Robin Penn’s two vocals have a palpable presence on the audio recording but are less convincing on the HD DVD. Sound effects have a pleasing dynamic range. And although there is a healthy bottom end, it neither pummels the solar plexus nor stimulates the anal sphincter. The surrounds are used well, enveloping the viewer in rain and the carnage of Gendel’s attack. Very good, but not great.

The other Dolby Digital Plus 5.1 tracks are in French and Spanish. The optional subtitles are in English SDH, English, French, and Spanish.

The Supplements: What Goodies Are There?

There are two extras on disc one. First is In The Volume, a PiP feature that displays in a small window on the lower right either the actors being motion captured, or animatics, or storyboards. The second is Web Enabled Content that I could not evaluate since I don’t yet have a LAN-based Internet access in my dedicated home theater. The rest of the generous supplements are found on disc two; all are presented in 1.78:1 1080p and compressed with the AVC video CODEC.

A Hero’s Journey: The Making of Beowulf (23:55) featurette is available with an interactive option that displays text trivia and invites the viewer to press Enter on the remote control when an icon appears onscreen; that accesses shorter featurettes via seamless branching. I would have been happier if the disc warned me in advance that these shorts are also available as a series of featurettes that could be viewed with a handy Play All option. Sigh. (See the next section.) This film is a technological tour de force and this featurette and its associated shorts reveal just how the most finely grained motion capture system ever created was utilized. As someone who’s fascinated by the science of film, I found this to be quite fascinating. And yet, despite the technicalities, it wasn’t dry. Even Tom Hanks visits to see how the techniques have improved since Polar Express. Informative and entertaining.

The Journey Continues (21:14) is a collection of ten featurettes that support the first extra. They amplify and extend the concepts and add an enhanced level of detail. My ultimate preference would have been one long, well edited documentary that integrated all forty-five minutes of material.

In the Beasts of Burden – Designing the Creatures of Beowulf (6:55) featurette, production designer Doug Chiang takes us through the designs for the sea monster, the dragon, Grendel, and his demon mother. The influence of the actors on the visual look of the characters is made clear, an evolution provoked by performance.

In The Origins of Beowulf (5:13) featurette, screenwriters Neil Gaiman and Roger Avary, director Robert Zemeckis, and producer Steve Starkey differentiate between the classic Beowulf hero figure and the reimaginig found in the screenplay.

Creating the Ultimate Beowulf (1:58) is a featurette similar in tone to the creating monsters featurette. We learn how Ray Winston was cast and affected the visual character. The actor concedes that the director wanted to create the ideal hero, a man of impossible physical prowess, much unlike himself, but that he welcomed the digital techniques that finally allowed him to play a Viking warrior.

The Art of Beowulf (5:24) featurette puts the emphasis on the production design and Doug Chiang’s work in particular. This is an intelligent discussion of how the design extended historical accuracy for the sake of cinema, the lighting techniques and the film’s palette, and the influence of being produced for 3-D.

A Conversation with Robert Zemeckis (10:10) looks a little soft; perhaps it was recorded in 720p. It’s really a Q&A at USC after the first 3-D screening of the film. As you might expect, the questions are fundamentally about working in the motion capture/CGI form. This is the filmmaker’s third CGI, motion capture effort and he makes a good case for the appropriateness of the form for specific material and the freedoms and economies made possible by the technique.

There are eleven Deleted Scenes (13:13 aggregate with the handy Play All option), but don’t expect high definition, or even 480p. These are animatics that never made it to the rendering farm. Interesting but not compelling.

The last supplement is the film’s theatrical trailer (1:57). On the downside, notably absent from all the supplements is Angelina Jolie; even the PiP feature displays storyboards during her appearances. On the upside, bravo, Paramount, for an all-HD program.

The 114-minute film is organized into fifteen chapters.

Final Thoughts

Not quite at the testosterone level of Warner’s 300, Beowulf satisfies with gratuitous violence, a bit of gratuitous nudity, an imaginative tale of legendary proportions, and a creative execution. But like Polar Express, the CGI inadvertently puts an emotional barrier between the characters and the audience. At least that’s my reaction; I felt more like an outside observer rather than someone being drawn into the film’s drama. Regardless, there is considerable entertainment value, great looking images, fine sound, and generous supplements of high quality. Recommended.
 

Here’s a note about the apparent duplicate Buy Guide. Our I.T. people are hard at work on a large project and have not yet had the time to modify the underlying site database formatting code to accommodate the new 0-to-10 rating scales. So until they do, for HD on disc, I’ll insert this note and a Buy Guide at the end of the review text and leave the conventional 0-to-5 Buy Guide blank.