APRIL 18, 2008 - VOL. 1, ISSUE 11

I came into this film without any foreknowledge. The only smidgen of information I was given was that Angelina Jolie was in it and she played a monster. It took me a moment to realize that the action on screen was the actual movie and not some sort of introductory clip. Is this it? Is this what the whole movie is going to look like? I have to assume that this film would be really impressive if you saw it in the theaters. I saw it on my twenty-inch television though, and on that Beowulf's strange computer graphics came across as being cheesy rather than compelling. I felt like I was watching one of those introductory video clips they show in RPG videogames. Only this clip went on for almost an hour and a half, and I never got any extra points.

Films like The Polar Express, Sin City, and 300 all have a similar aesthetic. They all have managed to capitalize on this new style—one first developed in videogames. What I don't understand is why movies are borrowing from video games at all. This technology was developed in game systems to act as a substitute for actors because the technology did not allow for live action in the games. The images in games are constantly being updated to look more real, to mimic film, and that makes sense to me, but why would a film want to look more like a videogame, which is the end effect of using this type of technology in a motion picture?

Jean-Franáois Baudrillard, a French social theorist, sociologist, and philosopher, had a theory about something he called "the hyper-real." Baudrillard theorizes (at some length) that in the contemporary industrial world, we have replaced the real object for what he calls "simulacrum." The "simulacrum" is a copy of a copy e.g., McDonald's restaurants: every store is modeled after the other and the model each store is based on was also a copy of another store. This can also be seen in the products we consume (e.g., iPods—what is a "real" iPod? Aren't they all just copies of some other iPod in different colors?). The end result of this is that there is no traceable or tangible original. Our reality is reduced to mere copies—hence, "the hyper-real."

As I watched a bunch of computer generated warriors get drunk on mead and tickle busty maidens with their shiny pink computer generated tongues, the only thing I could think of was Baudrillard. Here I was watching a film based on one of the most classic and revered poems from antiquity, and it looks like a frat-party in a videogame. What makes the images even more disconcerting is the fact that I could vaguely recognize a few of these obnoxious philanderers. All I could think was "is that really Anthony Hopkins—why the hell is he in this picture, and why the hell would you put a great actor like that behind a stupid cartoonish image?"

The faces of the characters resemble the voices of the actors behind them. These images are in part made up of a traditional cinematic picture, but they have then been retouched and turned into something strange and foreign. Their facial gestures are quick and unnatural, and the movements of their bodies appear jerky and staggered. They look like a videogame; they look like the hyper-real, but maybe that was intentional. In the scenes where the characters are supposed to be having serious conversations is when the film feels the most ridiculous. These bizarre cartoonish gestures that are supposed to represent grief simply appear to try contortions of pixilated flesh. There is no emotion; there is not a performance. All that the film gives you is a lifeless representation of one.

Beowulf is a film, but film is a product, and every product is made for a consumer. I think it would be safe to say that Beowulf was produced for young men. It's hyper-real aesthetic, combined with a lot of drinking and sex, topped off with some long—and nauseating—fight scenes with big scary monsters. It's the perfect film to give someone who loves playing Resident Evil, drinking Old Style, and has a subscription to Penthouse.

But Beowulf does much more then simply mimic the videogame aesthetic. It also highlights the human body, and not necessarily in a flattering way. Beowulf is extremely bodily. By this I mean that the film both visually and thematically revolves around the human form. Large paunchy bellies are juxtaposed with rippled swelling muscles. There are several cleavage shots that are more awkward then erotic due to the fact that the cleavage is simply an unnatural computer-generated lump of flesh. Angelina Jolie is reduced to a shimmering box—an embarrassing cut-out of a woman. The erotic elements of her body that remain become more farcical than erotic. And, while there might have been the potential to turn her physical distortion into something ethereal or monstrous (either one would have been appropriate for her character) she winds up looking like a glowing Barbie doll with a tail. I suppose the success of games like Tomb Raider and Beach Volley Ball stand as a testament to the fact that some people do find computer-women's bodies to be sexually appealing, but I don't.

All the activities in the film that are derived from the body: drinking, having sex, fighting, and feasting. In part this is due to the poem that the film is based on. It is the story of a warrior, and so it is animalistic in some ways, glorifying the body as our most basic and powerful tool. A warrior is defined by bodily action and engagement. While there are strategic processes behind battle, the warrior is not a thinking character; they are a character of action, one that uses their body to accomplish their final objective. But in Beowulf, the bodily elements are heightened to the point of absurdity. They aren't real people; they are computer-generated copies—they are hyper-real, and as such they lack depth. These are simulacra.

But people today don't seem to mind that so much. We live in the age of Second Life. People all around the world are spending their evenings online watching their avatars do all sorts of dirty things. There is a pleasure that our society gets out of seeing our bodies re-acclimated in a foreign environment and made to act in ways that are not so foreign. Beowulf is capitalizing on that. Just the fact that this film was made the way it was seems to imply that in the current culture we feel much more comfortable avoiding the reality of our own bodies and escaping into the ridiculousness of the hyper-real.

I found the film to be disappointing. The story should have been able to satisfy on a story level and overcome my tiny viewing station. I wanted a film that went back to that Old English poem. I wanted the drama and the grandeur that supposedly accompanied the great epic of Beowulf. What I didn't want, and what I got, was a weird imitation of that ancient epic dressed up like sprites and polygons. The multiple layers of production that resulted in this film, whose visual aesthetic is a copy of a copy, have diluted it. Perhaps somewhere in this endless process of reproduction and borrowing from other media, the story and drama exist, but not in the package presented. The hyper-real is at its best in Beowulf, and at its best the hyper-real shows its limitations.