2 posts tagged “cgi”
This morning, we braved some slick highway to Albuquerque to see Mom to the airport on her way back to Missouri. Since it was early in the day, and since the theaters are much nicer in Albuquerque than they are in Farmington, we decided to take in Beowulf before heading back.
We paid an extra $2.50 each for a pair of glasses that made me look like a wannabe Buddy Holly lookalike, and in a short while we were in the theater.
The movie is excellent. Whether it qualifies as a live-action movie or a CGI cartoon, I'll leave up to people with more interest in those distinctions. At first, the animation seemed somewhat cartoonish, but as the movie progressed, it became smoother and more realistic, until by the end of the movie there were parts (especially the parts with Angeline Jolie) where it was very difficult to determine if we were watching CGI or filmed action.
3D has definitely come a long way since the days of the red and blue pieces of plastic, now being done, I understand, with polarized lenses that don't distort the color. Where in the theater you sit seems to make a slight difference, as the images on the edge of the screen weren't as clear as images nearer the center. Still, it was eyepopping.
Okay, so the story... didn't make a whole hell of a lot of sense. I don't know, not having read even a translation of the original, how closely it followed the text, but as a story the plot didn't really flow. As a myth, however, it was fine, and watching it in that context it was enjoyable.
However, if I had to hear the Ray Winstone bellow, "I am Beowulf!" one more time, I was going to stand up and scream, "Yes, we know! We heard you the first dozen times!"
The moral of the story seems to be this: No man can resist the beautiful Angelina Jolie, no matter how... disreputable she is.
Upon watching the movie 300, I have the following thoughts:
1. I thought I was in pretty good shape. Now I think I'm in serious need of a Soloflex. Or, at least someone to CGI a six-pack on me.
2. Is there a movie rating for "Ewww"? This movie is soaked in sex and violence in a very visceral, intertwined way that is very disturbing. I needed cleansing after watching it.
3. Visually, this movie is astounding. It's also groundbreaking in its technique. I honestly couldn't tell you which parts of the movie are CGI and which aren't. That's kind of the point - it's completely seemless - but there is definitely CGI in use, 16 terrabytes of CGI, in fact.
4. It's probably the most compelling, pro-war film I've ever seen. "Go violence!" it says, and says it very well.
5. It is based on a graphic novel, which in turn was inspired by another movie, The 300 Spartans, 1962, which is in turn based on the actual Battle of Thermopylae. I sincerely hope no one leaves this movie thinking they've seen an historical reinactment, but in reading the article on the battle, much of the historical details of the story are included. Minus the Caliban-like Pleistarchos, and the like, of course. Oh, and it is unlikely that Xerxes was nine feet tall.
The most ironic historical inaccuracy is that the 300 Spartans did not, in reality, stand alone against the Persians. In reality, 1,000 to 2,000 Spartan slaves fought alongside their masters. This is ironic because the film makes much of this being a battle against slavery, tyranny. The character Leonidas made several speeches out of how they would prevail because they were 300 free men fighting against an army of slaves. Even as I watched the movie, I thought, "Didn't Sparta have slaves? I thought Sparta had slaves." They did. This is historical revisionism at its best. It's also not true because although a large majority of the other Greeks left before the final battle, 700 Thespians stayed behind with the Spartans, which is interesting because if one were to believe the movie, everyone in Greece who was not a Spartan was a complete and total coward.
As far as stories go, this isn't a very good one. 300 is formulaic and predictable, and the historical inaccuracies seem to all be designed to conform to formula. I loved the technique and visual effects (even the ones that made me gag), but I wish they had been used to make a better movie.
