Watching Beowulf in digital 3D, I’d occasionally “ooh” or “ah” at a very long track back through snow-covered tree branches or men grounding a boat at a great distance from our perspective on a beach made of millions of carefully-rendered grey rocks.
Otherwise, the film sucked. Complete waste of time, unless you like yelling. Oh, maybe Crispin Glover’s interesting–gives his most intelligible performance in garbled pidgin Middle English, with his lower jaw jutting to the right (I kept waiting for him to tell me about sling blades) and oozing blood and pus and mucus from every pore.
I’m curious why you thought it would be anything other than crap. You didn’t take “the kid” to see this did you? And I have a hard time imagining Kris leading you down this path.
Former students asked. I thought it might not be crap because Neil Gaiman’s–and to a lesser extent Roger Avary’s–pedigree shouldn’t be sneezed at. (I’m also an old fan of Zemeckis, so… the verdict wasn’t pre-ordained.) And, more reflectively than my review, I might say I am interested in what if anything the technologies involved could do for film.
But I should have waited to assess the technology later. (Gaiman’s also behind–further behind–a film coming out next year [Coraline] by Henry Selick, which looks with its gorgeous 3D stop-motion pupppetry, to have real potential…)
Outlander deploys a smart high-concept notion (what if the Beowulf saga was based on an alien fallen to earth?) then tunnels deeply into the possibilities for tedium, mining them all.
I watched the canary die in the first 5 minutes, and should have turned the film off. There are actually 2 fallen aliens, one the gruesome Grendelish monster, but the other is his sworn intergalactic enemy, the strange-unworldly James Cavaziel. Cavaziel’s alien crashlands, a fellow crew-member perishes, and he pulls out a cool holographic p.c. and checks where he is — finding out he’s on Earth (and the computer helpfully tells him it’s the Iron Age). Then he asks for and receives a download of the language, so he can be fluent, and apparently this is painful. Apparently you look in a little eyesocket and then you shake and moan and the camera sticks around for a little while watching you shake and moan (AC-ting!) and then you bleed out the nose.
The science fiction, such as it is, is an excuse to do a Beowulf movie. The Beowulf movie is long, but also has the benefit of being slow to the point of painful. And who knew Beowulf could be so exactly mapped onto the generic structure of the Hollywood C-grade monster movie? It can.