Director Robert Zemeckis has a love affair. It is not with a woman. It is with the tracking shot.
There is a scene very early in Beowulf where the camera tracks backwards, away from King Hrothgar’s (Anthony Hopkins) Mead Hall, in one long, continuous shot. The camera slowly backs away from the hall, then the town, then flys over the land, beyond hills, through forests and caverns until it comes to rest upon the monster Grendel. It is a shot that is reminiscent of one that Zemeckis used in the film Contact, where he tracked the camera away from Earth, through the cosmos, beyond planets and stars for what seemed like several minutes.
Tracking shots are difficult to accomplish without special effects. Zemeckis clearly loves them, and this goes a long way toward explaining why Beowulf is 100% computer generated. Peter Jackson showed, with the Lord of the Rings, that these sorts of films could be made without CGI characters, but Zemeckis composes so many complex camera shots and uses so many long, uncut tracking shots that it becomes clear, very early in the film, that he could not have accomplished all of his goals using live action and real actors without an astronomical budget.
This begs the question: Was it worth it? Well, yes and no.
It is easy to admire what Zemeckis has accomplished with this film. There are moments when the camera is panning around, scanning back and forth, allowing us to see every meaningful moment of action with long, uncut sequences, and the overall effect is breathtaking. It is a feast for the eyes, and we immediately realize we’ve never seen camera work like this before. Zemeckis zooms us around, up and down, from sky to ground with such effortlessness that we feel a bit like a God, observing from on high, the events unfolding. It is a marvelous way to behold the retelling of a legendary story.
At the same time, we feel a bit cheated. When the camera has to fall on human flesh, it is clear that the characters are artificial, and they move with the same awkward stiffness as their cgi counterparts in Shrek. They lack the emotional range or weight of real actors, and that weakens the human element of the story. Of course, the lackluster writing and forgettable dialog don’t help matters much either.
But Zemeckis did not set out to create a tear-jerking, heart-pulling epic like Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings. Beowulf is all about spectacle. It is about translating a fantastic story into an equally fantastic film. And in that regard Zemeckis has succeeded. Beowulf is, above all other things, fun to watch. It is an explosion of imagery; a bounty of wonderful camera work and long, uncut scenes. It is the visual antidote to films like the Bourne Ultimatum.