Movie Review: Beowulf

I finnnaaally saw the movie Beowulf!! It was cool and since it's a landmark film from ImageMovers Digital, I thought I should write up some comments.

I see this movie as being sort of a proof-of-concept for Robert Zemeckis's idea of the future of digital filmmaking. There is a lot of stuff that could have been better - sure. But the point is NOT to focus on the little errors in animation, or really intense long-zoom-out camera moves... it is important I think to look past those details and see the underlying technology itself. This is more of a proof of what CAN be done, and therefore what kind of technology can be used for future films and storytelling.

The extra features were AWESOME - really showed some crazy stuff about how they motion captured the characters. I can't believe they motion captured like 30 horses in their studio, that's INSANE! Anyway great concept, and script was pretty good, but this feels more like a "holy crap I can't believe they can do that" movie. It definitely shows major technical improvements over Polar Express from 5 years ago.

Extrapolating forwards by 5 years, I can imagine the future of the IM Digital work is going to be pretty phenomenal. This is really some of the hardest stuff to get "right" in CG - and pretty cool that they are tackling this problem head-on. I think it has a long way to go. But this certainly was a good "stab" at it, as it were. :)