"Beowulf" - IMAX 3-D

Left: That crafty she-monster, Angelina Jolie, dons a disguise so as to look like Queen Wealthow, and appears to Beowulf in a dream.


Donned the magic glasses and saw the spears thrust rudely in my face, but what else transpired?:

In Denmark in the year 507 a.D., elderly King Hrothgar (Anthony Hopkins) dedicates his new mead hall in a drunken revelry. He and his people have conquered other lands and collected much booty. Although his queen, Wealthow (Robin Wright Penn) clearly disapproves, the assembled warriors and maidens clearly enjoy themselves. However, in a cavern not far from the mead hall, the singing and dancing is a painful nuisance to the misshapen half-human, half-demon Grendel (Crispin Glover). Enraged, Grendel attacks the mead hall and kills or maims many of the warriors. He spares Hrothgar's life, however. After he returns to the cavern, his mother, a water demon (Angelina Jolie) soothes him. The next day, Hrothgar orders the mead hall sealed and sends out a call for a hero to come and rid the kingdom of Grendel.

Thus, in time, comes Beowulf, the fearless Geat warrior, to the rescue....

Much killing ensues.....in part, by a wicked (but fetching) Angelina Jolie....

By and large, the script was pretty lame: a dim-witted adolescent's idea what 6th-Century warriors must have sounded like. The 3-D aspect was fun, but gave the entire production an artifical aspect - entirely-too-much-animation.

Here is a selection from an interesting review:

This is what I expected from 300. Pure, unadulterated, throbbing, awful, awesome, cock-swinging spectacle from first frame to last, if Beowolf kicked any more ass you’d have to watch it standing up. Similar almost to Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers in the way it uses its own source to devour itself, it’s not quite as slobberingly juvenile as it may first seem, but then again, it really kind of is, and said juvenility is but part of its grunting efficacy. I can’t really claim that Beowolf is any damn good, but it is what it is, and its peculiar genius is that it couldn’t possibly be what it is any more so.

...Instead, it’s simply testosterone awesomeness, in all the heinousness and exhilaration that that implies, to the point that it plays like the raging successor to Conan the Barbarian, but even more outlandish and penile by dint of its technological remove from actual humanity. Best of all, it has a soundtrack that’s like pure pumping muscle expressed in music, as if Basil Poledouris’s flaming skeleton had erupted from the earth and belched fiery Wagnerian fifths onto parchment (who knew Alan Silvestri had that in him?). Look: at one point Beowolf is swallowed whole by a sea-monster and then, sword-first, thrusts out of its eyeball, stands covered in viscera atop its head, and bellows “BEOWOLF!!!” Need I say more?