It’s another day, and there’s another Beowulf red-band (for restricted audiences only) trailer out in Cyberland.

As you well know, Robert Zemeckis (Back to the Future, Forrest Gump) has been pushing motion-capture technology for several years as a vehicle for making family-oriented movies. Zemeckis animated Tom Hanks and company in 2004’s Polar Express to great success, and produced Steve Buscemi and crew in 2006’s Monster House, to not-so-great success. But this time, Zemeckis is using motion-capture in a more adult setting, adapting the classic 9th Century poem for the silver screen.

Does the motion-capture work? Leaving aside the question of whether mo-cap is animation, this flick seems pretty photo-realistic. Robert Zemeckis could have easily gone live-action with CGI (a la Michael Bay with Transformers) or gone the green-screen route (Zack Snyder with Sin City or 300). Some have argued that Beowulf would work better if Zemeckis had used one of these techniques, instead of going mo-cap.