Celluloid Confetti

Last Friday, I was lucky enough to see Beowulf in 3D at the BFI Imax in London’s South Bank. Now, I have long been a fan of Beowulf ever since I came across a picture of Grendel in an illustrated book of monsters when I was a child.

It was, I can reveal, the scariest creature second only to the Gorgon, so I turned the page very quickly when I came to it.

Many year later, I was responsible for a small interactive exhibit in a local museum on Anglo-Saxon myths and legends. I put together a series of especially gory illustrated panels that outlined the story, alongside a Punch & Judy style puppet theatre. The theory was that the shell-shocked children could overcome the horrors they had just witnessed via cathartic re-enactment.

(My approach was based on the treatments developed for use with child soldiers from war-torn regions of Africa, who are helped to come to terms with their experiences using dolls)

Well, after they had dried their eyes and put down their swords, the kids seemed to have had fun, so I am surprised Beowulf hasn’t been brought to the big screen before.

Okay, so there was the 1999 Christopher Lambert sci-fi flick, but I am going to stick my neck out (a Highlander reference there, if you spotted it) and say that it probably wasn’t very good.

Then there was Beowulf & Grendel (2005), an Icelandic film starring Gerard Butler, Stellan Skarsgård and Tony Curran (who I last saw on stage alongside Alan Cumming in John Tiffany’s fantabulous production of The Bacchae, in which he played Pentheus as a very angry, sweaty Alastair Campbell-type. In a dress. No, really).

Anyway, from the sound of it, Beowulf & Grendel does sound like an interesting take on the tale: like Wolfgang Petersen’s Troy and the Clive Owen-starring King Arthur, it purports to reveal the historical ‘truth’ behind the myth (ie, Grendel wasn’t a monster, but a very big, angry man of uncertain parentage).

On reflection, however, Troy was rubbish, so this doesn’t necessarily recommend Beowulf & Grendel.

So I was delighted and intrigued when I heard, a year or so back, that Robert Zemeckis would be helming a brand new Beowulf adaptation filmed entirely using motion capture.

Zemeckis used a similar technique in the fun Polar Express, which allowed Tom Hanks to play half a dozen different characters including - alarmingly - a child (sort of like Big, but in reverse). The same technique was also used in the Zemeckis-produced Monster House, but that film had no pretensions towards photorealism.

This time round, the technology is much improved - particularly the life-like quality of the eyes, which, unlike earlier computer-generated efforts, have the motion and spark of living creatures, not eerily lurching waxworks.

The upshot is that Ray Winstone - no spring chicken - can play the Norse Grendel-basher as a seven-foot tall pillar of Scandinavian muscle, rather than as the loveable cockney wide-boy we know and love from Sexy Beast (2000).

It also means that Angelina Jolie can appear fully-frontally naked, liquid gold trickling over her thighs, her nippleless breasts bouncing lightly as she stalks across the surface of the water.

Now, I don’t know about you, but I am pretty sure that has to be a good thing.

But if the thrill of seeing a naked Anglelina Jolie doesn’t melt your sword, here’s the clincher: the entire film is in 3D!

Now, as gimmicks go, most 3D films are up there with smell-o-vision, which is a roundabout way of saying that they stink. But Zemeckis uses the technology to restrained effect - rather than cluttering the film with jabby-jabby moments (argh! my eyes!), he uses 3D to add depth and texture to each frame.

For example, a golden drinking-horn features prominently in the story, and the way the firelight played across its engraved surface made the archaeologist within me sing with joy.

And because the entire film is computer-generated, Zemeckis is able to achieve a much deeper depth of focus than conventionally filmed 3D. That said, it’s not perfect - some characters tend to ‘ghost’ around the edges, but overall it’s the best use of the technology I have ever seen.

As legend has it, when the Lumière Brothers’ Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat (1896) was first shown, members of the audience fled the room, fearing they would be caught under the wheels of the oncoming locomotive.

But when I saw Beowulf, whenever Angelina Jolie appeared, exactly opposite seemed to occur. Members of the audience rose from their seats, and began to blindly charge towards the screen, perhaps in the hope that she would reach down, pluck them into the air, and envelope them in her arms. By the end of the movie, the stairs of the IMAX theatre were littered with their twisted, broken corpses.

If you haven’t read it, Beowulf is a great tale, and this fantastic film entirely does it justice. It’s one of my favourite films of the year.