Beowulf is Cool, Yo!

I saw the animated Beowulf in 3D right before Thanksgiving, and while the look of the movie was impressive, I was even more shocked by the way that they tweaked the old Norse legend and actually improved on it, and gave it an ambiguous ending to boot.

One of the annoying things about it was that some of the characters looked exactly like the humans voicing them, like Antthony Hopkins, Angelina Jolie, and surprisingly, Crispin Glover, but others did not, like Beowulf himself--voiced by 50 something Ray Winstone, and for some reason they couldn't make Robin Wright Penn's character look like Princess Buttercup, a semi-major failing. The movie tries to do too much, shoehorning a quasi-critique of Christianity as the "new religion" that is destroying the heroic age that doesn't really fit in the movie, and also features a monster wearing high heels (guess which one!).

Here is a trailer that actually captures the transformed story pretty well, without giving too much away. I hope.