Beowulf images return
concept art for Robert Zemeckis movie back on web
Check out more concept art for Paramount's upcoming motion-capture movie Beowulf. WARNING: NSFW images below.
(Source: www.playfrance.com)
Back in December, I told you about some Beowulf concept art that showed up on Ain't It Cool News. Paramount's legal team moved at hyper-speed to get AICN to pull the images but, sure as death, taxes and Lindsay Lohan doing drugs, the images have returned to the Interweb, this time to French film site Play France.
Apparently, Ubisoft is putting together a Beowulf game for the Playstation 3 platform and they're using these images as part of their research. Paramount released the images to Ubisoft, and someone leaked them back to the Net.
So what do we have here? There's a dragon flying through the air, several views of Heorot (Hrothgar's keep), a dude in armour (I'm thinking Older Beowulf), and a whole mess of Angelina Jolie in various poses, most of them involving some kind of artistically necessary nudity.
Actually, a "whole mess" of Angelina Jolie doesn't even come close to describing it: it's obvious the artist was obsessed with the actress since those pictures are particularly detailed when it comes to her . . . assets. Speaking of which, check out the mother of all assets below.
I also have to wonder how Paramount's publicity department got these images out of the artist's hands; I have a sneaking suspicion that coercion/threatened withholding of wages had a lot to do with it. I also would not be surprised if that artist made copies, which are now taped to the ceiling above his bed.
Just to recap, Robert Zemeckis (Forrest Gump, Polar Express) is directing this motion-capture adaptation of the classic Anglo-Saxon epic about Viking heroes fighting hideous monsters and a whole mess of "Hrothgar, son of Mothgar, son of Tothgar, best friend's brother's roommate's girlfriend's lesbian lover's drinking buddy's friend who met this guy who heard about this girl . . ."
Okay, so I made that last bit up but let's just say that if you pulled the geneology lesson from Beowulf, the poem would be a hell of a lot shorter. The guys responsible for doing that (you know, writing the script) is the somewhat odd writing pairing of Roger Avary (Pulp Fiction, Killing Zoe) and Neil Gaiman (Stardust, Mirrormask).
Lending their voices to this movie are Anthony Hopkins as King Hrothgar, Robin Wright-Penn (The Princess Bride) as Queen Wealhtheow, John Malkovich as Unferth, Alison Lohman as Ursula, Ray Winstone as Grendel, Brendan Gleeson as Wiglaf, Crispin Glover as Grendel, and the aforementioned Angelina Jolie as Grendel's mother. Oh yeah, and Alan Ritchson as Beowulf's body, since Ray Winstone has a great voice, but he doesn't look terribly heroic.
You can see all the images by clicking here. Beowulf opens November 16th.
Fun fact: Beowulf started to be taken seriously in 1936, when J.R.R. Tolkien wrote a paper called Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics. In it, he claimed that the fantastic elements in the poem were essential to the poem, and that Beowulf should be taken seriously as a work of literature not just as history. Some claim that without Tolkien's lecture, Beowulf would not be studied today. Hordes of high school students regularly curse his name for doing this.
Oh yeah, that Tolkien guy wrote a couple of epic books, too. You might have heard of them: The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.
