BEOWULF [PG-13]

After separating the spectacle of this eerily photorealistic CGI adventure from its story, each stands up pretty well to scrutiny. Champion of the spectacular Robert Zemeckis and his team have improved upon the creepy, dead-eyed children of The Polar Express to tell the epic story – the original epic story – of the legendary Scandinavian hero Beowulf (Ray Winstone). He achieves his greatest glory by killing the feared monster Grendel (Crispin Glover), though his subsequent encounter with Grendel’s mother (Angelina Jolie) remains a story with him as the only witness (and ripe for the kind of embellishment that created sprawling yarns like this one in the first place). Years later, he must confront the very foundation of his fame and set right a wrong that has haunted him for the lifetime since that fateful fight.

Despite the movie’s abbreviation of the original poem, most teachers will cede, “Whatever gets the kids to read Beowulf.” Writers Neil Gaiman (Stardust) and Roger Avary (the snubbed other guy behind Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction) pare it down pretty efficiently, establishing the characters and their interactions in the first act. The second act deals firmly with Beowulf’s deed and devilish deal, which becomes too much for him to deal with in the third. Gaiman and Avary handle the nature of heroism well, and they give Beowulf as a flawed hero more than just lip service. It is all a Cliff’s Notes of the Cliff’s Notes, but with no chance of dozing off.

Every scene looks so carefully staged because it is. The technology allows for a scene to be animated first, with the camera movements worked out later. It makes for some really spectacular play, not even considering the 3-D, which is available in many theatres. This is not the cheap red lens/blue lens 3-D your folks grew up on. This is a clever computer-controlled illusion that results in far less eyestrain and much more depth. The scene in which Grendel attacks Hrothgar’s mead hall is terrifying, and Grendel himself is one of the most petrifying creations ever put to screen (and kudos to Glover for imbuing him with humanity). His mottled, pus-flecked skin, his gargantuan frame, his ghastly gaze all make up a monster menace of no equal (though the dragon is a grand and terrible creation of another kind).

With the exception of Beowulf fighting Grendel while nude (played with unintentionally hilarious junk-masking gimmickry like in Austin Powers / Billion Dollar Brain), Zemeckis and company play things pretty straight, including the violence. Testing the limits of the PG-13, the force of every violent act is real and immediate, with a full complement of blood and viscera. The nudity is pretty extreme, too, with Grendel’s mother (sporting Angelina’s bod) with more than one full frontal scene (minus nipples and other offending details). The fact that it is all animated must play into the generosity of the rating, as this would be a hard-R were it live-action.

The fantasy that Michael Crichton spun in his 1981 film Looker has come to be; computers can now render actors convincingly enough that their flesh-and-blood counterparts may someday become moot. Zemeckis has really done it, crafting much more than a $70 million Steve Reeves movie and creating characters and an environment so immersive that the audience forgets that it is watching an animated film (unless, of course, unless there is popcorn butter on the glasses). Now if someone would author a program that could write a screenplay, writers – and by extension, writers’ strikes – would become unnecessary, too.••• –Robert Newton