Eye Candy #150 - "Beowulf - Director's Cut"

Beowulf - Director’s Cut: Or as I like to call it, "The Viking Express". Or "Shrek" with boobs and fewer talking creatures. Having been one of those poor souls actually required to read "Beowulf" while growing up, when Robert Zemeckis, in the behind-the-scenes featurette, says "This isn't the 'Beowulf' you read in school!", he says it all. I should have watched that featurette BEFORE I saw the film, it would have explained a lot. Like the glaring deviations from the plot, the over-play of sex and violence, the weird naked Beowulf/Grendel fight, a ton of stuff that made NO sense in the context of the original story that seemed unnecessary. It managed to take a relatively interesting story and neuter it for the sake of CGI-animated gory fights (more computer-rendered than animated; this is the new Rotoscope!). The ending of the film (Beowulf and the Dragon) is much better than the beginning and middle of the film (including the absurdly comical "swim contest"). It's just a shame I had to sit through all that to get to it. Woodchuck sez, "Strictly middle-of-the-road.