+1
I saw Beowulf over the weekend. It seemed like a good bet for a matinée. It is a story that seems to lend itself to film interpretations pretty well - from what I know about it... I've never actually read the whole thing through. I was interested in seeing the trailer for Cloverfield too... but also wanted to see how well they did the motion capture thing.
I think Yoda's review is just about spot on. I wasn't overly impressed with the full motion capture at first, but I ended up (OK, it took me all of 20 minutes) liking it in the context of doing a movie such as this.
At this point with the technology, I don't see a movie that isn't FX and CGI heavy really needing to use it, unless they are looking for a specific stylized "feel" to the film. With the FX needed to pull this film off the way it was made, it did make sense to go full motion capture, instead of trying to integrate live action and CGI... it looked better, even more seamless, to me.
I saw the movie in a regular theater, but, like Yoda, I saw the places where the intentions to see it in IMAX and/or 3-D came in. They did a very good job of integrating those scenes in with the film as a whole, so they weren't just completely overt in their purpose, but they were there. Don't get me wrong though, I saw nothing wrong with them, they didn't detract from the film. They were quite effective. I do have to agree on the issue with the PG-13 rating. There was too much silly, gratuitous, nudity. I just didn't see why it was needed, and felt that it turned a strong PG-13 for the violence, into what should have been forced into R rating territory, especially after seeing the number of younger kids (certainly younger than 13) that were there. Don't get me wrong... I'm all for some Angelina Jolie flesh flashing, but even though it was just a frontal tease, between that, and the rest of it, this just should have been rated R.
One thing that I thought of after having seen how far the technology has come was an idea about the Matrix films...
I wonder if they might have been even more interesting if they had been made in like a year or two, as the motion capture tech matures even more... and all of the scenes of when people were in the Matrix, were shown in capture, and those not in the Matrix, were live action... just a thought...
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