'Beowulf' Trailer and Website Arrive

While 20 minutes of Beowulf was apparently screened last night at Comic-Con, the trailer and website for the film have landed online this morning. Although it's not 20 minutes, it certainly gives us a fairly dazzling look inside the world of Beowulf; director Robert Zemeckis' motion-capture follow-up to the disappointing Polar Express. But sometimes you need to sacrifice a film in order to learn and grow. Sure, Polar Express was fairly cool to look at, but it was just way too ... blah. Now, however, with Roger Avary and Neil Gaiman penning the script (which is based on an extremely old Anglo-Saxon poem), Zemeckis has a whole new world to play with. I figured he had improved the motion-capture technique since working on Polar Express, but I didn't expect to see him come this far. Visually, this movie looks amazing. The characters look so real (especially Angelina Jolie) that, for a moment there, I couldn't tell the difference between the real Angelina and the motion-capture Angelina. Until I saw the tail. I think there was a tail. Mmmm ... Angelina with a tail. Yum.

Anyway, Beowulf (Ray Winstone) tells of a warrior who must protect his town from the monstrous Grendel (Crispin Glover reuniting with Zemeckis for the first time since Back to the Future); an evil thing out killing all the towns folk. But once he gets Grendel out the way, then comes Grendel's mother (Jolie) -- a powerful woman who looks to seduce Beowulf before exacting her revenge for the murder of her son. Apart from Jolie, no one else really looks like the person they are in real life. Winstone is all bulked up and warrior-like, Glover is completely different and even Anthony Hopkins (who plays King Hrothgar) is hard to make out, with the exception of his, um, wide body shape. Stay tuned to Cinematical for much more Beowulf talk from Comic-Con; the film itself hits theaters (in 3-D on roughly 1,000 screens) on November 16.