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Beowulf (Director's Cut) (HD DVD)
Paramount // Unrated // February 26, 2008 // Region 0
List Price: $39.99 [Buy now and save at Amazon]
Director Robert Zemeckis boasts in the extras on Beowulf that performance capture technology frees him to work more closely with his actors. Instead of fretting about whether or not a particularly outstanding take is in focus, making sure a grip isn't caught munching on a cheese sandwich in the background of an emotionally resonant sequence, or overseeing lights as they're lugged around for each meticulously arranged setup, the director 
can just focus on getting the best performances he can from his cast. Zemeckis likens it to theater, even if most stage performances aren't exactly renowned for having their actors clad in identical jumpsuits and emoting through a couple hundred sensors scattered across each of their faces.
Beowulf is an uneasy mix of performance and bleeding-edge technology; the wireless electro-oculographic tracking systems attached to each actor may reproduce the muscle movements of their eyes on a computer, but it can't capture that spark of life that a performer can bring to the stage, and that's the problem with the movie as a whole. Beowulf feels like a technical exercise -- computer-rendered wizardry devoid of any real warmth or humanity under its glossy exterior.
Still, screenwriters Roger Avary (Pulp Fiction) and Neil Gaiman (The Sandman) do an admirable job reshaping the epic, sprawling poem down to a more concise and accessible two hour movie. Beowulf opens in the decadence of a sixth century Danish kingdom. The lands reigned over by Hrothgar (Anthony Hopkins) are drowning in sex and mead, and as the wizened king drunkenly revels in another empty conquest, the monstrous Grendel (Crispin Glover) storms into the hall. The shrieking, tormented beast rends dozens of Hrothgar's finest soldiers limb from limb, insatiably feasting upon their innards before once again tearing off into the night. Hrothgar offers both his kingdom's untold riches in gold -- as well as the hand of his beautiful young queen Wealtheow (Robin Wright Penn) -- to any man brave and skilled enough to slay Grendel. Many try, and many fail.
The spirits of the kingdom turn dark and dour until the arrival of Beowulf (Ray Winstone). This legendary slayer of monsters is obsessed with glory -- overinflating
his retellings of his already mighty victories -- and he eyes Hrothgar's riches and kingdom as his own. Beowulf must face not just the grotesque Grendel but the troll's gilded, seductively demonic mother (Angelina Jolie) and, decades later, the catastrophic remnants of his own moments of shame and weakness.
Beowulf quickly distinguishes itself from the 3,000 line poem that's long been required reading for anyone passing through junior high school. Earning the unrated banner on the flipside of the case, Beowulf opens with mead licked from heaving cleavage, soldiers pissing in a corner, and Hrothgar's men tumbling off of tables as they ravage whatever women are within arm's reach. Limbs are ripped off, and Grendel savagely gnaws on the head of one of Beowulf's men. While weaving a story about his lone failure as a hero, Beowulf cleaves one sea monster in half and plows his way through another's eye. He carves off the wing of a dragon, risking life and limb to skewer the beast's heart. There's a startling amount of carnal lust and nudity as well, although Beowulf isn't quite as daring as Eastern Promises, obscuring its hero's naked encounter with Grendel as if it were an Austin Powers sequel.
As Zemeckis puts it, his vision of Beowulf is a world of drinking, killing, and fucking. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but this adaptation doesn't leave much else to grab onto. The digital recreations of actors like Anthony Hopkins and John Malkovich are photorealistic but are still so stiff and lifeless that I felt as if I were kept at arm's length from the characters. They're just real enough to look unsettling, and the performances still seem as if they're being mimicked rather than recreated. The eye movements, for instance, may closely follow
what the actors were doing on a stage in front of some 250 infrared beams, but there's no life or humanity to them. The visual effects are dazzling, and the scale of the action sequences kept me enthralled throughout, but Beowulf did little to draw me into its story.
It's impressive that Paramount would devote $150 million to such a bleak, brutal visual effects spectacle. There's nothing rousing to cheer for; Beowulf's moments of triumph are still tainted by deceit and failure. It's a movie about the emptiness of myth and legend...the facade of heroism...sopping with blood and sex. In an era when blockbusters are neutered to reach the widest possible audience, it's commendable that Paramount would stand behind something as savage and hard-edged as Beowulf. It's a pulp re-envisioning of the epic poem, and Beowulf does succeed as a visceral action flick. The fairly thin story may be forgettable, but its outstanding, sprawling battles are not, and the movie is worth recommending on those merits alone.
Video: Beowulf may turn out to be one of the last titles to make its bow on HD DVD, but it's still among the most instantly striking releases that either format has to offer. Presented at its theatrical aspect ratio of 2.39:1, Beowulf easily stands strong as a reference quality disc. Depth and dimensionality are both exceptional -- not surprising for a movie so frequently screened in 3D theatrically -- and are bolstered by a startling level of clarity and fine detail. The visuals can be challenging, but the AVC encoding never once shows any sign of strain; even the strobing effects of the flickering blue flame heralding Grendel's arrival aren't marred by any trace of artifacting. Beowulf's palette leans more towards dingy, candlelit, earthen hues, and these colors are rendered flawlessly on HD DVD. A handful of scattered moments reveal some slight and easily ignored aliasing, but this HD DVD is otherwise perfect, among the most visually dazzling titles on either next-generation format.
Audio: Early
murmurs pointed to this disc including a TrueHD soundtrack, but even though Beowulf lacks any sort of lossless audio, this HD DVD certainly doesn't seem to be any worse for it. Beowulf's aggressive, enveloping Dolby Digital Plus 5.1 audio amps up the intensity of the movie's elaborate action sequences; as Grendel flings bloodied, lifeless bodies across the mead hall and as the castle crumbles under the weight of Beowulf's aerial assault against a flame-spewing dragon, sounds violently careen from one channel to the next. Bass response is pounding and punishing, from the thunder of clattering hooves to this Danish kingdom being ravaged by a slew of different monsters. Even with as tumultuous and chaotic as Beowulf's action sequences can be, dialogue unwaveringly remains clear and discernable throughout. The clarity and distinctness of the individual sound effects are equally impressive; this is a movie with a meticulously crafted sound design, and that careful attention to detail is flawlessly reproduced on HD DVD.
Beowulf includes Dolby Digital Plus 5.1 soundtracks as well as subtitle streams in English, French, and Spanish.
Extras: Beowulf is another of Paramount's lavish two-disc special edition HD DVDs, with the set's second disc boasting a feature-length assortment of high definition extras.
The centerpiece of Beowulf's second disc is "A Hero's Journey" (24 min.), a comprehensive making-of featurette that places its focus squarely on the movie's unconventional production. Beowulf was shot on a 25'x25' stage, with an expansive array of cameras and infrared lights logging the performances of the actors through the hundreds of sensors scattered across their faces and bodies. "A Hero's Journey" also delves into the creation of and interaction with the movie's skeletal, barcoded, wireframe props, the elaborate costumes worn just once by the cast, Crispin Glover flinging around rag dolls on a half-scale set, the crew's struggle with several horses on such a cramped stage, and a runthrough a typically grueling day with Ray Winstone. Director Robert Zemeckis is proud of the flexibility this sort of shoot offers, enabling him to maintain a breakneck pace, freely rearrange the design of the virtual sets as necessary, and even recreate physical camera movements in the digital domain.
"A Hero's Journey" can be viewed traditionally or as part of an interactive version that overlays trivia and serves up branching points to related mini-featurettes. These ten brief featurettes, each clocking in right at two minutes a piece, further explore the virtual set of The Volume and the quarter-million sensors used throughout the course of production, the fabrication of the wireframe props, the electro-oculogram technology used to record
muscle information and render more lifelike eyes, the elaborate rigs that suspended and flung the cast around in the air, and the storyboards, previsualization, and discussions behind Grendel's siege on the mead hall. All ten of these featurettes are available as part of "A Hero's Journey" as well as on their own under the "The Journey Continues" heading.
Several other featurettes have been included as well: a look into the design work behind Beowulf's monstrous creatures (7 min.), writers Roger Avary and Neil Gaiman extrapolating what may have been censored from the original transcriptions of the epic poem along with their process for reshaping its fractured structure for the screen (5 min.), how a plump British character actor could be molded into a statuesque, 6'6" mythical hero, and a showcase of the spectacular paintings, conceptual art, and physical models that defined the look of the film (5 min.).
In the ten minute Q&A that followed Beowulf's first 3D screening, Robert Zemeckis touches on the decade-long process behind bringing Avary and Gaiman's script to the screen, how performance capture allows for a more theater-like intimacy on the set and a much closer collaboration between actor and director, and how preproduction for a movie like Beowulf really isn't any different from a traditional film shoot. While the lack of an audio commentary is somewhat of a disappointment, I'd imagine most of the ground Zemeckis would have covered in a commentary track is addressed here and throughout the number of other featurettes.
So many of Beowulf's extras revolve around performance capture, and Paramount has gone to the remarkable effort of taking this one step further. Similar to the In-Movie Experience on Warner's 300, Beowulf's "In the Volume" feature overlays picture-in-picture video throughout the entirety of the movie, following a cast peppered with hundreds of sensors as they interact with each other
and wireframe props on the 25'x25' stage. The PiP window alternates between this raw footage -- syncing perfectly with the action in the movie proper -- with early renders of each scene. It's the sort of intriguing extra I'd hope will continue to be standard practice for this type of movie, and it's at the very least worth setting aside some time to skim through a few chapters.
Beowulf is a web-enabled HD DVD, and as I write this, the downloadable features are limited to key cast/crew biographies and text-based production notes. The bulk of these just briefly summarize the featurettes and interviews elsewhere throughout the set. Once downloaded, these notes can be displayed at any time with a press of the 'A' button.
The only of these extras not to be presented in high definition is a set of eleven deleted scenes, offered in low resolution, pre-vis CG and running thirteen minutes in total. It's mostly brief character moments and short sequences bridging the events in the movie. A theatrical trailer rounds out the extras.
Conclusion: Beowulf is better appreciated as a visual spectacle than as a movie, but its hyperkinetic emphasis on unrelentingly brutal action and dazzling computer graphics still leave it well worth setting aside the time to watch at least once. The movie looks and sounds phenomenal on HD DVD, and although several of its featurettes seem somewhat cursory, the set is bolstered by a strong set of high definition extras. Recommended.
The images scattered around this review are promotional stills and aren't meant to represent the way the movie looks in high definition.
can just focus on getting the best performances he can from his cast. Zemeckis likens it to theater, even if most stage performances aren't exactly renowned for having their actors clad in identical jumpsuits and emoting through a couple hundred sensors scattered across each of their faces. Beowulf is an uneasy mix of performance and bleeding-edge technology; the wireless electro-oculographic tracking systems attached to each actor may reproduce the muscle movements of their eyes on a computer, but it can't capture that spark of life that a performer can bring to the stage, and that's the problem with the movie as a whole. Beowulf feels like a technical exercise -- computer-rendered wizardry devoid of any real warmth or humanity under its glossy exterior.
Still, screenwriters Roger Avary (Pulp Fiction) and Neil Gaiman (The Sandman) do an admirable job reshaping the epic, sprawling poem down to a more concise and accessible two hour movie. Beowulf opens in the decadence of a sixth century Danish kingdom. The lands reigned over by Hrothgar (Anthony Hopkins) are drowning in sex and mead, and as the wizened king drunkenly revels in another empty conquest, the monstrous Grendel (Crispin Glover) storms into the hall. The shrieking, tormented beast rends dozens of Hrothgar's finest soldiers limb from limb, insatiably feasting upon their innards before once again tearing off into the night. Hrothgar offers both his kingdom's untold riches in gold -- as well as the hand of his beautiful young queen Wealtheow (Robin Wright Penn) -- to any man brave and skilled enough to slay Grendel. Many try, and many fail.
The spirits of the kingdom turn dark and dour until the arrival of Beowulf (Ray Winstone). This legendary slayer of monsters is obsessed with glory -- overinflating
his retellings of his already mighty victories -- and he eyes Hrothgar's riches and kingdom as his own. Beowulf must face not just the grotesque Grendel but the troll's gilded, seductively demonic mother (Angelina Jolie) and, decades later, the catastrophic remnants of his own moments of shame and weakness. Beowulf quickly distinguishes itself from the 3,000 line poem that's long been required reading for anyone passing through junior high school. Earning the unrated banner on the flipside of the case, Beowulf opens with mead licked from heaving cleavage, soldiers pissing in a corner, and Hrothgar's men tumbling off of tables as they ravage whatever women are within arm's reach. Limbs are ripped off, and Grendel savagely gnaws on the head of one of Beowulf's men. While weaving a story about his lone failure as a hero, Beowulf cleaves one sea monster in half and plows his way through another's eye. He carves off the wing of a dragon, risking life and limb to skewer the beast's heart. There's a startling amount of carnal lust and nudity as well, although Beowulf isn't quite as daring as Eastern Promises, obscuring its hero's naked encounter with Grendel as if it were an Austin Powers sequel.
As Zemeckis puts it, his vision of Beowulf is a world of drinking, killing, and fucking. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but this adaptation doesn't leave much else to grab onto. The digital recreations of actors like Anthony Hopkins and John Malkovich are photorealistic but are still so stiff and lifeless that I felt as if I were kept at arm's length from the characters. They're just real enough to look unsettling, and the performances still seem as if they're being mimicked rather than recreated. The eye movements, for instance, may closely follow
what the actors were doing on a stage in front of some 250 infrared beams, but there's no life or humanity to them. The visual effects are dazzling, and the scale of the action sequences kept me enthralled throughout, but Beowulf did little to draw me into its story. It's impressive that Paramount would devote $150 million to such a bleak, brutal visual effects spectacle. There's nothing rousing to cheer for; Beowulf's moments of triumph are still tainted by deceit and failure. It's a movie about the emptiness of myth and legend...the facade of heroism...sopping with blood and sex. In an era when blockbusters are neutered to reach the widest possible audience, it's commendable that Paramount would stand behind something as savage and hard-edged as Beowulf. It's a pulp re-envisioning of the epic poem, and Beowulf does succeed as a visceral action flick. The fairly thin story may be forgettable, but its outstanding, sprawling battles are not, and the movie is worth recommending on those merits alone.
Video: Beowulf may turn out to be one of the last titles to make its bow on HD DVD, but it's still among the most instantly striking releases that either format has to offer. Presented at its theatrical aspect ratio of 2.39:1, Beowulf easily stands strong as a reference quality disc. Depth and dimensionality are both exceptional -- not surprising for a movie so frequently screened in 3D theatrically -- and are bolstered by a startling level of clarity and fine detail. The visuals can be challenging, but the AVC encoding never once shows any sign of strain; even the strobing effects of the flickering blue flame heralding Grendel's arrival aren't marred by any trace of artifacting. Beowulf's palette leans more towards dingy, candlelit, earthen hues, and these colors are rendered flawlessly on HD DVD. A handful of scattered moments reveal some slight and easily ignored aliasing, but this HD DVD is otherwise perfect, among the most visually dazzling titles on either next-generation format.
Audio: Early
murmurs pointed to this disc including a TrueHD soundtrack, but even though Beowulf lacks any sort of lossless audio, this HD DVD certainly doesn't seem to be any worse for it. Beowulf's aggressive, enveloping Dolby Digital Plus 5.1 audio amps up the intensity of the movie's elaborate action sequences; as Grendel flings bloodied, lifeless bodies across the mead hall and as the castle crumbles under the weight of Beowulf's aerial assault against a flame-spewing dragon, sounds violently careen from one channel to the next. Bass response is pounding and punishing, from the thunder of clattering hooves to this Danish kingdom being ravaged by a slew of different monsters. Even with as tumultuous and chaotic as Beowulf's action sequences can be, dialogue unwaveringly remains clear and discernable throughout. The clarity and distinctness of the individual sound effects are equally impressive; this is a movie with a meticulously crafted sound design, and that careful attention to detail is flawlessly reproduced on HD DVD. Beowulf includes Dolby Digital Plus 5.1 soundtracks as well as subtitle streams in English, French, and Spanish.
Extras: Beowulf is another of Paramount's lavish two-disc special edition HD DVDs, with the set's second disc boasting a feature-length assortment of high definition extras.
The centerpiece of Beowulf's second disc is "A Hero's Journey" (24 min.), a comprehensive making-of featurette that places its focus squarely on the movie's unconventional production. Beowulf was shot on a 25'x25' stage, with an expansive array of cameras and infrared lights logging the performances of the actors through the hundreds of sensors scattered across their faces and bodies. "A Hero's Journey" also delves into the creation of and interaction with the movie's skeletal, barcoded, wireframe props, the elaborate costumes worn just once by the cast, Crispin Glover flinging around rag dolls on a half-scale set, the crew's struggle with several horses on such a cramped stage, and a runthrough a typically grueling day with Ray Winstone. Director Robert Zemeckis is proud of the flexibility this sort of shoot offers, enabling him to maintain a breakneck pace, freely rearrange the design of the virtual sets as necessary, and even recreate physical camera movements in the digital domain.
"A Hero's Journey" can be viewed traditionally or as part of an interactive version that overlays trivia and serves up branching points to related mini-featurettes. These ten brief featurettes, each clocking in right at two minutes a piece, further explore the virtual set of The Volume and the quarter-million sensors used throughout the course of production, the fabrication of the wireframe props, the electro-oculogram technology used to record
muscle information and render more lifelike eyes, the elaborate rigs that suspended and flung the cast around in the air, and the storyboards, previsualization, and discussions behind Grendel's siege on the mead hall. All ten of these featurettes are available as part of "A Hero's Journey" as well as on their own under the "The Journey Continues" heading. Several other featurettes have been included as well: a look into the design work behind Beowulf's monstrous creatures (7 min.), writers Roger Avary and Neil Gaiman extrapolating what may have been censored from the original transcriptions of the epic poem along with their process for reshaping its fractured structure for the screen (5 min.), how a plump British character actor could be molded into a statuesque, 6'6" mythical hero, and a showcase of the spectacular paintings, conceptual art, and physical models that defined the look of the film (5 min.).
In the ten minute Q&A that followed Beowulf's first 3D screening, Robert Zemeckis touches on the decade-long process behind bringing Avary and Gaiman's script to the screen, how performance capture allows for a more theater-like intimacy on the set and a much closer collaboration between actor and director, and how preproduction for a movie like Beowulf really isn't any different from a traditional film shoot. While the lack of an audio commentary is somewhat of a disappointment, I'd imagine most of the ground Zemeckis would have covered in a commentary track is addressed here and throughout the number of other featurettes.
So many of Beowulf's extras revolve around performance capture, and Paramount has gone to the remarkable effort of taking this one step further. Similar to the In-Movie Experience on Warner's 300, Beowulf's "In the Volume" feature overlays picture-in-picture video throughout the entirety of the movie, following a cast peppered with hundreds of sensors as they interact with each other
and wireframe props on the 25'x25' stage. The PiP window alternates between this raw footage -- syncing perfectly with the action in the movie proper -- with early renders of each scene. It's the sort of intriguing extra I'd hope will continue to be standard practice for this type of movie, and it's at the very least worth setting aside some time to skim through a few chapters. Beowulf is a web-enabled HD DVD, and as I write this, the downloadable features are limited to key cast/crew biographies and text-based production notes. The bulk of these just briefly summarize the featurettes and interviews elsewhere throughout the set. Once downloaded, these notes can be displayed at any time with a press of the 'A' button.
The only of these extras not to be presented in high definition is a set of eleven deleted scenes, offered in low resolution, pre-vis CG and running thirteen minutes in total. It's mostly brief character moments and short sequences bridging the events in the movie. A theatrical trailer rounds out the extras.
Conclusion: Beowulf is better appreciated as a visual spectacle than as a movie, but its hyperkinetic emphasis on unrelentingly brutal action and dazzling computer graphics still leave it well worth setting aside the time to watch at least once. The movie looks and sounds phenomenal on HD DVD, and although several of its featurettes seem somewhat cursory, the set is bolstered by a strong set of high definition extras. Recommended.
The images scattered around this review are promotional stills and aren't meant to represent the way the movie looks in high definition.
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