The Uncanny Valley: Beowulf's Dead-End Alley

Speaking of rendered humanoid realism, and as follow-up to a recent 3-D projection writeup, I (along with friends Helen and Terry) caught an opening-weekend showing of Beowulf a few weeks back at the Sacramento, CA IMAX theater location (center-of-row seats, mid-way back in the auditorium). Back in April, I’d indicated that this film’s pending release potentially (based on its market success) marked the movie theater industry’s tipping point towards a broad embrace of 3-D. As I’ve argued in the past, I believe that this evolution is essential to its long-term survival.

How was Beowulf? Well, the 3-D presentation was quite impressive. Yes, there was the occasional ‘gimmicky’ effect, such as a spear thrusting out of the screen towards the audience, but the depth rendering was (unlike with some 3-D films I’ve screened in the past) generally seamless. Unfortunately, and unlike with my prior 3-D experience at the IMAX (what’s changed? I dunno…), I found that I saw distracting ‘ghosting’ effects through IMAX’s active LCD shutter glasses unless I kept my head still and perfectly oriented side-to-side and front-to-back.

Strangely enough, in looking back at my past posts, I’d also earlier experienced ghosting effects, this time with Real D’s competitive passive-glasses projection system in viewing Chicken Little…but not with the Real D-based The Nightmare Before Christmas a bit over a month ago. Odd. Beowulf was also screening in other Sacramento-area theaters that used Real D’s system, and in retrospect I should have done a comparative viewing. One other nitpick before proceeding…Beowulf is first and foremost a classic epic poem of ancient Anglo-Saxon literature, which many of you probably first read in high school English class. To say that the film’s script writers elaborated on the original manuscript would be…charitable. Call me a purist…

I didn’t realize until the film started rolling (or more accurately, the bits started streaming off the hard drive) that Beowulf was completely CGI…although in retrospect it makes sense, as this approach greatly simplifies the right-and-left-eye view 3-D rendering process. As this article in Post Magazine explains in detail, the filmmakers employed a combination of completely computer-rendered and originally motion-captured (and later computer-tweaked) content. I’ve previously discussed the Uncanny Valley effect:

Beyond a certain point of attempted human realism, we become repulsed by still and animated images, robots, and the like; our eyes and brains know ourselves best, and they become fixated on the minute differences between a computer-generated humanoid (which appears corpse-like) and the real thing.

Beowulf may be the most aggressive pursuit of attempted human realism in CGI that I’ve seen since the box office disaster Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within. As with that prior valiant (if fiscally unsuccessful) effort, I was generally unable to ’suspend disbelief’ and forget that I wasn’t viewing real-life human actors on-screen. Note, however, the ‘generally’ qualifier in the previous sentence; on occasion, a particularly unrealistic rendering snapped me back to reality, and I realized that I’d actually spent the preceding few minutes disregarding the fully-CGI nature of the material.

My Pixar writeup from last week focused on the evolution of computer hardware and software that was clearly evident from chronologically watching the various clips on the Short Films Collection: Vol. 1 disc. That same impressive, exponential evolution was equally evident in watching Beowulf, particularly in certain scenes where, judging from their notable detail, I suspect the visual effects staff devoted a disproportional large amount of the total film budget as measured in creation-and-rendering manpower and computer horsepower.

Flesh-and-blood Hollywood actors probably don’t have to worry about job security…yet. But the time of cyber-reckoning is looming on the horizon, and I suspect it’ll be here sooner than some of you believe.

What did you think of Beowulf?

Followup: Wired’s coverage