Beowulf: Uncanny, and not in a good way…
Ash and I saw Beowulf on Saturday. As I mentioned to SR388 afterwards, Robert Zimeckis seems to have a summer home in the Uncanny Valley. Being sufficiently distant from my high school reading of the original poem, I was (and largely still am) unable to speak to the film’s accuracy in that regard. However, it seems that the studio which Zimeckis has again wrangled into working on his CG flight of fancy has been constrained once more by his 100% faith in the ability of motion capture to eliminate the need for animators. Needless to say, there’s a lot of REALLY bad animation in the movie, and characters are often so unexpressive it hurts. They also seem to have been unable to overcome the “creepy-mouth-itis” plaguing the black girl from Polar Express, because there’s a few characters with this tragic affliction in this movie. Most obvious is Grendel’s mother, played by Digitalina Jolie (see what I did there?). I’m honestly somewhat baffled that they’d go through all the effort to recreate Angelina Jolie’s face in CG and then totally fail to make that face move like its real-life counterpart. As with the black girl in Polar Express, her lips slide up her face when she talks, and god damn it’s creepy as all hell (not to mention painfully obvious to anyone who has ever seen Angelina Jolie speak). John Malkovich’s character (whose name I can’t remember because they were all Norse, and poorly enunciated to boot) had a similar problem, only his mouth just tended to alter its size depending on the scene it was in… sometimes it was very tight-lipped, and other times it was absurdly wide. Other characters (even Beowulf, who was actually the worst offender) had the opposite problem: their mouths sagged when they talked, so they looked like they were perpetually frowning through their lines, even when frowning isn’t really physically possible (like when shouting at the top of one’s lungs). I can only assume that it was some vague attempt to get the characters to actually look like they were emoting, but it just made them look even worse.
I think the thing that best illustrated the mo-cap handicap was all of the animation that obviously wasn’t mo-capped… like Grendel, the dragon, and the other non-equine animals (the horses were as wooden as their human riders, which tells me they probably mo-capped a horse at some point). The hand-keyed stuff was fantastic, and just made the mo-cap look that much worse because of it. As with Polar Express, there’s really no reason why this film needed to be completely CG in the first place… in fact, there’s even less of a reason here, because the stylized realism of Polar Express was replaced with regular old realism for Beowulf. I think this film would have been far more engaging (and far less creepy in general) if the CG had been left to where it was actually needed: monsters, dragons, epic stunts, and bloody dismemberment. This technique works to spectacular effect 99 times out of 100 in Lord of the Rings… why re-invent the wheel for this one? Why put all that added work into creating CG characters when you’re just going to make them look like their voice actors? It’s really no wonder that Pixar actually put a graphic at the end of the credits for Ratatoullie stating that no motion capture or “other production shortcuts” were used in the creation of their film… the extra work always pays off, and I can’t blame them for wanting people to recognize that, given the competition.
On a side note, the most amusing thing to me was the fact that the Beowulf logo in the film uses the same font as the in-film logo for Lord of the Rings (the gold one on the black background, not the one on the box cover). Also, Crispin Glover can’t seem to get away from creepy roles, even in CG… he was Grendel. Perhaps even creepier is that Grendel does actually look a bit like Crispin Glover…
Also, to move on to something completely different for a second, I just want to quickly mention that I think the level of paranoia around application signing is kind of absurd, especially as it pertains to the iPhone’s forthcoming SDK. Apple has application signatures built into Leopard as a way to ensure that the application is what it says it is, and that it hasn’t been modified by an external source (like a virus). I don’t see how, as Erica Sadun suggests, the signing of iPhone apps is a way to make sure that they’re “vetted by Apple” (and thus, to propagate FUD, be limited to only those apps which Apple approves of having on the phone). They’d be vetted by the developer, if anything, since unless I’ve completely misunderstood how signatures work, they’re the ones who’d be creating the signature for the app in the first place; it’s just an MD5 hash of the app’s contents. Apple’s just making signed apps a requirement on the iPhone, which is a move I can hardly argue with.