In what dimension?(Into the Wild and Beowulf)(Movie review)

"EYE CANDY, that's what it is. I liked it, but it's eye candy," my young companion I 1 exclaimed as we walked out of the 3-D version of Beowulf, Robert Zemeckis combination of digital animation, an epic poem and, for just about the first time since 1953, 3-D photography.

I had to admit my young friend was right. You only experience a simulation of actual performances in this version of Beowulf, nor do you expand your ways of seeing, as some of us did back in the early 1950s with early cinemascope and, sometimes, 3-D. Instead the film is an uneasy combination of puppet show and cartoon. Diverting, yes, exciting, certainly, but Beowulf is as ephemeral as a piece of candy.

As for the 3-D, it does seem to be an advance on the technology I experienced briefly in 1953. For one thing there are no red and green lenses in the spectacles provided with your tickets: also the 3-D can be perceived with one eye. This was impossible fifty years ago; Andre de Toth, director of the 3-D House of Wax, couldn't see the film he was making because he had only one eye. (In spite of this the film was supposed to be very effective.) Now the spectacles are like Polaroids with the tints blended.

However, Zemeckis doesn't use the technology to tell his story; he just shows it off. An elaborate long shot will be incorporated to feature the greater depth of field. Compare this with Alfred Hitchcock's exploitation of a similar device in Dial M for Murder. Reportedly he used the deeper perspectives, especially in the top shots, to draw viewers into the confined space of the single London fiat where the action is set. (As with Rope, the master decided to remain within the confines of the original play and used every device he could think of to make the film cinematic.)

Even more interesting was John Farrow's use of 3-D in the excellent western Hondo. In this case very few audiences (myself included) saw the film in its original form. The new restored DVD release, while not reproducing the exact 3-D effect, does give the viewer some idea of how the original visuals worked. A form of deep focus replaces the extreme depth of field that must have existed in the first prints.

Except for some arrows and lunges in the knife fight that would have seemed to come straight at the audience, Farrow and his cinematographers, Robert Burks and Archie Stout, employed the so-called third dimension to place the characters in their environment and draw the viewers into their lives--enhancing the performances of John Wayne and the young Geraldine Page. Farrow also liked to employ long takes and elaborate travelling shots. (He is much admired by the likes of Bertrand Tavernier.) In Hondo there are not just the long takes showing parallel action, such as Hondo breaking a horse, linked by a single camera movement to the life of the small station where he has taken refuge; figures are repeatedly brought into the action from deep in the shot, and that hardy perennial of the period, the two-shot with both actors facing the camera, is given greater variety by having one or other deeper in the frame with one or other given some quite complex "business". Absent are the meaningless travelling shots used so often nowadays to "animate" the scene and distract from the dialogue and characterisation.

With Beowulf, on the other hand, the viewer is being assaulted by an alien world as monsters, axes, spears, swords not to mention severed limbs leap out of the screen. This is a pity, as Beowulf could have been much more than the filmic equivalent of a roller-coaster ride. Writers Neil Galman and Roger Avery scripted a thoroughly respectable adaptation of the seventh or eighth-century Old English epic poem that relates (with numerous digressions) how the hero Beowulf defeats not one, but two horrific monsters. The first is Grendel, a slobbering giant, the other a winged dragon. I have to admit that both confrontations work very well in the film: in the best tradition of the horror movie the creatures are both fascinating and repulsive.