If all of the characters and scenery match, that’s cool, I don’t care if it’s wooden puppets or CGI. But the more “realistic” you try to make the characters, the harder it hits you when you get something wrong.

But Beowulf and Grendel’s mother looked REAL. After watching the movie with my fiancee, when I pointed out to her that those two had been CGI as well, she would not believe me until I showed her the interviews where the actors talked about it. If I hadn’t known already, I wouldn’t have been able to tell in most scenes either.

I dunno. I didn’t feel creeped out at all during the movie. Maybe it was because I didn’t see it in Imax. But, I did see the 3D version.

Most of the time it was fine, I think the female characters are mostly where I felt it, particularly with the queen. And probably “creeped out” isn’t really the right phrase, either, but more the sense that I got jarred out of the immersive movie and into thinking “that’s not a real person”. The other times were every now and then when Beowulf would speak (the mouth just didn’t move right) and a number of times when hands were in the scene — they looked kind of sausage-y. But the queen was the worst, I just never bought the image as being of a real person. Whenever she was on I’d think “Geez, that’s a plastic, stiff, computer simulation.” I think the trick with animation is to create a world that’s so consistent that you never fall out of thinking it’s real, but that didn’t work at those points in Beowulf, at least for me.

Overall, though, a really good movie that I liked a lot.

Jeff