Finally saw Beowulf 3D. Very impressed with the 3D technology for several reasons:
- It looked DAMN good.
- It didn't require a heavy electronic headset like some IMAX 3D flicks did back in the day.
- It didn't give me (or any of the other four people I went with, young and old) a headache, even after the entire two-hour run of the movie, nor did we ever feel the need to take the glasses off.
- It didn't make me nauseous (well, other than all the pus spilling out of Grendel).
- The glasses worked reasonably well over my prescription glasses (and you got to keep them).
- It worked with standard digital projection, meaning this exemplary 3D technology is already widely available.
As far as the movie itself, I thought it was very well done. I'm a bit of a Beowulf scholar, having taken a semester of Old English in college followed by a semester focusing solely on translating and discussing Beowulf. I thought the narrative changes they made were justified and made the characters, namely Beowulf and Hrothgar, more interesting. Made it less a story of hubris and more a story of how a weakness for beautiful women to the point of abdicating duty tends to

things up for everyone. More nuanced a tale than Beowulf simply ducking down a hole to skewer Grendel's fat nasty mother, as he does in the original.
I'm still not a big fan of Zemeckis' motion capture technology, primarily because I still don't see the purpose of it. When your goal is to make CG actors look as real as possible and exactly like their real-world equivalents, it begs the question why not just film real actors and save CG for the effects shots? As it is, the technology just becomes a gimmick and distracts from your storytelling rather than aiding it. You spend more time deciding which elements look right and which look off than you do focusing on the narrative and performances.
All of that said, I thought this was emminently more watchable and less creepy than The Polar Express, and you could see they're getting closer to bridging the uncanny valley. But they're not there yet.