He’s a big weirdo, but very cool in his own strange way. He seems to be building a career as “the creepy, threatening guy you cast when Christopher Walken isn’t nearly creepy or threatening enough.”
Are you familiar with his own independent films and writings?
http://www.crispinglover.com/
The script book cover has ‘as told by Neil Gaiman & Richard Avary’ on the front and also the phrase ‘with insights from the authors…’
The back page blurb says ‘a timeless classic adventure takes on astonishing new life.’
So, yes, of course it’s an adaptation, but they’re referred to as the authors, so I think my use of ‘written by’ is perfectly clear, but not exact in the context of Hollywood-speak.
I don’t mean to nitpick and I’m not hung up on Hollywood lingo, I just think it is a vast overstatement of Gaiman’s contribution.
If he were adapting a similar work from a living author, you can bet such liberties wouldn’t be taken.
That is a very perceptive and sophistocated guess- and IMHO Gaiman nailed this.
I thought the movie was fantastic, and shockingly gory, violent, and sexy- something I was not expecting from CGI. The 3-D effects were especially fun; much better than the last 3D I saw. (Halloween, I think, probably 15 years ago) Angelina’s sexy body and seductive behavior is necessary to the plot. Go see, go see, and we will spoiler this thread to death for the next couple of days.
It is a pretty cool movie. Definite thumbs up from me. I did keep expecting to see Shrek put in an appearance, though. Grendel’s first appearance is incredibly intense. After that scene, I thought; “What can they do to top that?” They didn’t, really. Oh, and Mrs. Pitt looks, well, beautiful.
I just saw it, and I really liked it! I’m one of the few people in the world who doesn’t usually find Angelina all that sexy. I sure did in the movie though; although seeing her feet formed into high heels seemed odd to me.
[slight hijack]
Sam, I think you’ll find there’s only one IMAX theater in Bangkok. The old one closed and moved to a new location. (I’m a journalist who covers IMAX.)
[/slight hijack]
I agree with all of this, including the Shrek part. There were a couple of parts where I was irresistably reminded of that franchise.
The first appearance of the monster is heart-stopping.
Not to give too much away but there is quite a bit that deals with human weakness and frailty (moral weakness, not physical weakness, although I guess that is in there too).
The John Malkovich character didn’t end up going where I thought it was at the beginning of the movie.
Finally, as a parent of a young child, a big ol’ “WTF were you thinking?” to the people sitting behind me, who apparently thought it was a perfectly fine idea to bring their adorable four year old boy to the 9:30 pm 3-D showing of what was probably the goriest most intense movie I have ever seen (CGI gore, but realistically rendered still). Disembowelments, impalings, dimemberments, body parts flying, blood pooling. Wouldn’t the kid be better off watching something like Teletubbies? I must be an old fogey or something.
Wow. This movie was really really bad. Saw it tonight, the 3D but not IMAX version, in a packed theater.
I think the one term that sums it all up is uncanny valley.
First of all, in the stricter visual sense - it was weird and uncomfortable watching these weird pseudo-human cgi zombies with their inability to focus their eyes properly and their real enough to turn off the suspension of disbelief, but unreal enough to be eerie and unsettling looks. They really should have gone the live action and cgi route like 300, especially since the two films seem to be so alike to begin with.
And the dialogue was somewhat stilted, like they forced the actors to loop to the animation or artificially sped it up to fit in a certain timeframe, or perhaps they were all recording their dialogue alone and not able to match the pace and tone of the other people whose dialogue was recorded later even though it was supposed to be a conversation.
But secondly, it had an uncanny valley effect in the metaphorical sense as well. It seemed unable to decide whether it was a silly cartoon like Shrek or a serious action/drama (using the words ‘serious’ and ‘drama’ here very loosely lol) like 300. For example, they felt the need to stay true to the original by making Beowulf fight in the nude, but they used ridiculously laughable methods to hide his groin area - literally on the same level as Austin Powers. A well placed candle here, a sword sticking up there, a quick batch of steam, a well placed helmet in the foreground. They had an awesome sequence later in the film with Beowulf fighting a dragon in mid air but nearly ruined it with clichéd moments like someone almost falling and then being caught at the last second my an outreached arm. There were some poignant moments with Grendel and his mother, and Beowulf facing the consequences of a tough choice later on. And a few amazing action sequences. But the potential emotional depth the film could have had, or did have in rare moments, was dissipated by the vestiges of the Shrek-era animation juvenile atmosphere.
This movie couldn’t decide if it wanted to be a lighter animated action adventure or a more serious source-inspired action drama, and so ended up being neither.
Beowulf didn’t fight Grendel nekkid in the original. He just didn’t use any weapons.
I can’t comment on the movie, because I haven’t seen it. Nor do I intend to, since Beowulf is one of my favorite stories, and the glimpses I’ve seen of the trailers fill me with disgust.
Marlitharn, one of my favorite stories as well, and I was well and truly moved by the film. I am The Girl Who Does Not Cry, and I wept for Grendel. What Christopher Glover did with Grendel’s role is stunning.
Saw the film (3D) this afternoon with younger daughter. She’s fourteen and loves this sort of stuff.
Have to say, it didn’t suck. The changes made created a more organic whole to the story, instead of a “random monster one, random monster two, random monster three” series of events.
Angelina Jolie was the one sour note for me, as I do not participate in the opinion of her as the most desirable woman in the world. They could have cgi’d her to look a little more exotic is all I’m saying.
And as I said to my daughter, Hagrid, um I mean Wiglaf is far too sensible a man to do anything other than give her the damn cup back at the end…
The wife and I saw it yesterday (Saturday). We liked it. Now that we’ve seen the non-3D version, sitting WAY up front to avoid the talkers and cellphone users, we may see if it’s playing at Imax and catch the 3D version.
Oh, I almost forgot: Grendel did not seem to be speaking English exactly. I could not understand him very well, but I could the others, so I assumed it was not the fault of the sound system (which sometimes happens). We saw the film at a cinema close to where we live, and unlike the better places in town, it often excludes English subtitles for third-language dialogue. Fortunately, his sentences were simple enough and slow enough that I could follow along reading the Thai script. But WAS Grendel speaking English??
Yes, but not modern English.
I thought it was a nice touch.
The communication problem made me really feel sympathy for the poor ogre.
Thanks. So there were English subtitles during his part then?
Nope. Had to pay attention and listen.
Nope, no subtitles. Had to pay attention and listen.
Odd. I usually only repeat myself when talking to the children…
Saw it today in IMAX 3-D. Except for the first five minutes, when the 3-D was out of focus and they kept stopping the film to try to fix it and not getting it right.
That may have affected my enjoyment of the film, because it took a long time after that to pay attention to much of anything but the 3-D effects. Some of which were very good and many were just the usual idiotic “look out for the sword coming at you!” nonsense.
When the film finally came together, there were some interesting bits and pieces. The action scenes were usually good and there were next to no battle scenes at all, which was wonderful. Some of the scenes of aging and regret and secrets and lies were also quite good.
The problem was that they kept being interrupted by scenes like Grendel’s Mother’s feet turning into high heels, which set off giggling in the audience. (Much of it coming from my seat.) Every other minute a similar condescend-to-the-audience bit of schtick would crush any heightened feelings from the minute before. I’m not a MS3K guy, but all I could think of was lines that people could shout back to the screen at this truly epic turkey. Maybe there was a left eye movie and right eye movie competing against each other for the 3-D glasses.
As for the motion capture process. Let it go. Either wait 30 years or do totally fantasy movies without humans. There was nothing that made the process worth the effort for this movie. The result was half dead faces, lips that didn’t quite sync up to the dialog, aged women with no wrinkles or character, and people flying across the room that looked as bad as the pure CGI in say, Spiderman 1. The technology isn’t up to dealing with people yet. Live with it.
One final thought: after reading this thread, I wonder if anybody at all thinks of Angelina Jolie as the epitome of sexiness. Or even as anyone special looking. She isn’t. Probably never has been, but certainly isn’t now.