next time ... invite the neighbours to your party

The new Beowulf movie (in 3D) does a good job merging what is essentially two seperate stories (Beowulf vs Grendel and Beowulf vs the Dragon) into a single cohesive whole through the mechanism of the third major monster in the tale (The Sea Hag, or Grendel's mother). However in doing so it adds something new to the subtext of the tale which was definitely was not in the original. As to what this new message was supposed to be was never really made clear, perhaps beyond an essential encouragement to practice safe sex. As a movie itself I felt it was marred by two things. Firstly they overused the 3D card by taking the opportunity every chance they had to assault the audience with sharp pointy things. This both dilutes the impact of when such things could be used to good effect, and would probably make the 2D version of the movie quite uninspiring. But I suppose that eventually the directors will get used to the new technology and just use it to tell the story and not be the story. In this sense the ad for the new Journey to the Centre of the Earth looks more encouraging (although substituting a father and his kids for a prepared scientific expedition is of dubious reality). The second was the gratuitous nudity in the film, or rather, the double standard they applied, and how they applied it. Both the Sea Hag and Beowulf had exquisitely rendered full frontal nudity shots, however in the case of Beowulf, a ridiculously comic succession of objects "conveniently" prevented the audience from seeing anything. The sequence went on so long the audience laughed at the ridiculousness of it; while such things work in a comedy like The Simpson's Movie, it doesn't work in a serious movie. They would have done much better to show Beowulf's admittedly heroic tackle (to judge by the appreciative reactions of the women in the mead hall), and not make a point of it. Meanwhile, we get a very slow pan down the body of a highly textured Sea Hag as water slowly and sensually "ungrasps" her body. Very sophomoric, and just what you'd expect from bored male CGI programmers.