Review by Matt Anderson

The Director's Cut of Beowulf offers only a few brief moments of extra gore, but it's still a mighty fine piece of storytelling, one that warns about the temptations and dangers of the more base human desires.

Beowulf is a poem, written sometime between the seventh and tenth centuries (as Terry Gilliam would no doubt quip, on a Saturday, noon-ish). It's an "Olde English" poem loaded with heroism and beer. This animated version uses the same performance capture process director Robert Zemeckis used on The Polar Express. The technology has come a long way since then, but this one is most definitely not for children. There is plenty of suggestiveness and faintly veiled nudity to warrant the theatrical version's PG-13 rating, not to mention the violence that goes with the territory of dragon slaying, monster fighting and boisterous mead drinking.

Beowulf is an adventure worth taking. But it's best to keep things in perspective and take this Beowulf for what it is, a reinvention of a 1,000-year-old story spun with many modern day sensibilities and a marvelous visual flair.

Overall, the disc offers a decent package of supplemental features. But, given all the work involved in this production and the clever retooling of the source material, a running commentary with Zemeckis, Gaiman and Avary could have been really enlightening. Unfortunately, no commentary track of any variety is on tap.

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