Humans in computer-animated ‘Beowulf’ lack soul

In theaters

BEOWULF, directed by Robert Zemeckis, written by Neil Gaiman and Roger Avary, 111 minutes, rated PG-13.

The new Robert Zemeckis movie “Beowulf” has a great ending – powerful, fiery and exciting. It’s a nice feat of showmanship, the best part of the film. You should know this because what comes before it, with few exceptions, can be long and tedious.

Set in Denmark and based on the 6th century Anglo-Saxon poem, the movie updates it all for the present with hot bods, nudity and sex – apparently, just what the masses ordered. It follows the great warrior Beowulf (Ray Winstone) as he accepts the challenge of a king (Anthony Hopkins) to kill the giant Grendel (Crispin Glover), who is busy wreaking havoc upon the king’s land.

It’s a situation that escalates into Beowulf also battling Grendel’s slinky minx of a mother (Angelina Jolie) and finally their offspring, who has the ability to morph into a fire-breathing dragon. Along the way, Beowulf drinks his share of mead, becomes king, garners the love of a queen (Robin Wright Penn), enjoys a lover on the side, grows a conscience and keeps his rock-solid abs throughout.

So, at the very least, the movie sounds reasonably entertaining, but here’s the thing: The film follows Zemeckis’ 2004 movie, “The Polar Express,” in that it uses performance-capture technology to turn its large cast of human actors into something that wavers between human and humanoid.

Achieving photorealism through computer animation is an inevitable progression of the CGI movement, but is photorealism really what audiences want from an animated movie? The recent successes of “Shrek the Third,” “Ratatouille ” and “Meet the Robinsons” suggest otherwise, but “Beowulf” begs to differ.

What we have here is a movie that renders beautiful interiors and landscapes but which fails to faithfully capture the human form. As such, there are problems with the technology that make for a distracting experience, one the movie struggles to overcome. The characters’ eyes, for instance, are unnervingly without soul, and the way the characters move, while sometimes fluid, is often too mechanized to appear real.

While the character Gollum from the “Lord of the Rings” movies was created using the same performance-capture technology, the effect worked for him because Gollum was a beast who could exist as a creature of the imagination. In the case of “Beowulf,” it fails to work because there’s confusion about what Zemeckis is trying to achieve here. If he wanted his computer-animated characters to appear as human as possible, then why didn’t he just scrap the technology and instead go with a live-action movie?

Whatever the case, at this point in the game, somebody needs to tell the director to get his head out of the computer and back into humanity, because “Beowulf,” while exciting at the end, is sorely lacking in humanity throughout.

Grade: C-

Black Friday DVD Gift Guide

So, it’s Black Friday. It’s still dark, you’re juiced on caffeine, and you’re ready to roll in stores long before any reasonable person would even consider doing so. Nobody is taking a sale away from you today, baby. You’ve got your game on.

Or maybe you don’t. For those who feel like paring down their list and getting through Black Friday without a black eye, the following are recommended DVDs to get you into the stores – and get you out of them – without a visit to the emergency room.

High-definition is big this year, so we’ll start with the clarity it offers. Fine choices on Blu-ray disc include the just released “Die Hard Collection” ($129.98), which assembles in one set all four “Die Hard” films (including the latest, “Live Free or Die Hard”), as well as Christopher Walken in “King of New York” ($29.99), Billy Bob Thornton in the holiday satire “Bad Santa” ($29.99), and Christian Bale and Steve Zahn in Werner Herzog’s harrowing Vietnam War movie, “Rescue Dawn” ($39.98).

The new unrated version of “Pathfinder” ($39.98) is available on Blu-ray, as is “Doctor Strange: The Sorcerer Supreme” ($29.99), the terrific “Pixar Short Films Collection, Vol. 1” ($34.98) and especially the 30th anniversary edition of “Close Encounters of the Third Kind ($49.95), which is among Steven Spielberg’s most influential films and which looks smashing on high-definition.

For those who prefer HD DVD, look for the complete first season of “Star Trek: The Original Series” ($198.99), “Shrek the Third” ($39.99) and the comic horror movie “Tremors” ($29.98) with Kevin Bacon.

For children, it’s a grab bag of good choices as many solid titles now are available, the best of which include “SpongeBob SquarePants: Season 5, Vol. 1” ($36.99), “Care Bears 25 Years of Caring Gift Set” ($39.98), which includes four DVDs as well as a plush Care Bear stuffed toy, “Nick Jr. Favorites, Vols. 4-6” ($36.99), Scholastic’s “Antarctic Antics” ($14.95), which won the Andrew Carnegie Medal, and “Animated Family Favorites” ($26.98), which features three full-length movies in “An American Tail,” “Balto” and “The Land Before Time.”

From the BBC comes a bounty, including the excellent “Michael Palin: Pole to Pole” ($49.98), two fine collections of comedies in “The Complete Black Books” ($59.98) and “Little Britain: The Complete Collection” ($99.98), and the war documentary “Secrets of World War II ($34.98). The best of the lot is “Monarch of the Glen: The Complete Series” ($198.98), which takes place in the Scottish Highlands at the Glenbogle estate, which Archie MacDonald (Alistair Mackenzie) is charged to save from financial ruin. To do so, he’ll need to reconcile with his father, hardly an easy task, but as this engrossing series proves, nothing really is easy in the life of this young laird.

Visit www.weekinrewind.com, the archive of Bangor Daily News film critic Christopher Smith’s reviews.