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I didn't read IsM's feeling about the animated as being a negative feature of the film. am I worng? He called the movements animated, and ABG called them stilted and awkward.
My feeling is somewhere in the middle. Like IsM, I grant Beowulf the benefit of being an animated film. I also feel that the video capture elements were a little "too" real, a little lacking in the somewhat exagerated tradition of animation - be it 2-D or 3-D. The Final Fantasy movie, and lo, it's earlier video games cousins suffered from the same issues. The more surrent FF video games seem to have resolved most of the awkwardness of having photo-real animated characters moving "too" realistically, but I think that the strange quality of video capture is part and parcel to the technique.
Actors used to use posing as part of acting, and it was over the course of decades that the traditions of acting changed to become more realistic in execution. Animation, particularly the photo-real variety, has seen a very sudden change in its psychosymbolic language. The video cpatue technique is a big part of that sudden change, and it does come with advantages as well as the obivous drawback of awkwardness. Either we will get used to the rather eerie reality, or filmmakers will develop techniques for animating photo-real characters which have more elegant motion.
I think the adaptation was decent, though it was certainly about as true to the original story as "300" is true to the oldest versions of that tale. It's a modern re-creation of an old story. I do like that in this case Beowulf's mother is a creature of cruel beauty, not a hag. We, as a modern audience, can better understand the failure of a king if he is seduced by Angelina Jolie than by a grotesque hag, no matter how terrible her power. It just translates better to film.
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