In short: It SUCKED!

I just got back from seeing Beowulf, or should I say, I just got back from seeing part of Beowulf. I walked out about 20 minutes into the movie and demanded my money back.

The movie starts and I'm sitting there watching it. Right from the beginning, I'm thinking that something is not right about this movie. It doesn't look right. I can't quite put my finger on it at first. After a few minutes, I realize the truth. The entire movie is CGI animation! Not just the occasional CGI monster, but everything! This would not be a bad thing in and of itself. The CGI animation was the most amazing, most realistic CGI animation I've ever seen. Unfortunately, that's the only good thing I can say about the movie.

Not more than a few minutes into the movie, Grendel the monster shows up. Now, I rather expected there to be some build up to this. Nope. We get a very good look at Grendel. He is the stupidest, most pathetic looking monster I have ever seen. Not scary at all. He looks like a giant, deformed man who seems to be missing his skin. He looks like a goofy skinless giant. Once Grendel finished his attack by killing everyone in sight, he leaves and returns to his lair. There he talks to an unseen character (Angelina Jolie's character?) and then he starts talking in Italian or something. Huh? It made no sense.

We are also treated to a very high quality CGI animation of an obese Anthony Hopkins staggering around as the drunk king, wearing nothing but a toga. At one point we come perilously close to seeing a CGI animated full-frontal nudity shot of an overweight fat guy. Um, no thanks.

The CGI animation was also very inconsistent. At some points, it was nearly flawless. Unless you looked closely you couldn't tell it wasn't a live action person. At other times, I thought I was watching a bad rip off of Shrek.

This movie was supposed to be your typical, intense, serious action movie. Lots of cool sword fights, big scary monsters, etc. I kind of expected another '300' style movie - stylized violence. Instead we find a movie where the entire audience was laughing at everything! It's a very bad sign when the audience of a serious action movie is laughing at the utter ridiculous stuff they are watching. At least I can have faith in the fact that the rest of the audience clearly was thinking the same thing I was - This movie is pathetic and stupid.

This movie deserves to bomb.

I grieve for the obscene amount of CPU cycles that went into rendering this movie. From a CGI point of view, this movie is ground-breaking. It's just suck a pathetic movie, that this fact will likely be forgotten.