Before embarking on watching this I knew how I would start the review, I had this whole thing about The Graham Norton show and Ray Winstone‘s penis.

but then

The movie started and it was simply incompatible with my eyes, my jaw went slack as I tied to process it, I couldn’t look away? but I had to look away. The idea that a 2007 feature film could look like Paw Patrol was shocking, but as I started to process it, it made perfect sense. THEN I paused the film and went and watched the trailer for Iron Man (2008) and discovered I understood nothing as it looks amazing.

I have a recurring thought pattern, with marvel movies especially, why are they bothering with shooting anything practically when so much of the film is constructed in the computer? Moments into Beowulf felt I was closer to a concrete answer than I’d ever been before, you could argue there’s a marketing component, but as the unwritten penis anecdote demonstrates, Chris Evans could still do J Leno if he wasn’t in a frame of Captain America. It just doesn’t seem we’re actually past the ‘uncanny valley,’ we’re not at the point where you can just animate a convincing performance in the close up.

Seeing this so demonstrated in a film with $150 million to spend is fascinating. Beowulf has other issues, but it is objectively technically excellent for the time and it falls so so short, barely even being ‘watchable’ so to speak.

And as for those issues, it’s riddled with shots to show off it’s 3Dness that look like ass. It’s very constrained in space, they could certainly have built sets. Also the forewarned penis, there are heroic levels of entirely comical framing and blocking employed, so that you never see so much as a frame of Beowulf hog. It’s actually distracting, they have him bouncing around in the buff and there’s always a sword or a helmet or horn a blocking his sword/helmet/horn.

I think that’s all I have to say, a Paw Patrol styled comedy adaption of a 1000 year old poem. With like, maybe 3 or 4 moments where the performances of its leads shine out and leave you slack jawed for the right reasons.