No sex please, just violence

Many were surprised that a film so brutal got a 12A rating. I'm surprised that a film in which sex is the motivating force of the plot should be so visually coy.

Bodies rent in two? Heads ripped off? Warriors impaled on spikes? Check. The monster Grendel's arm, severed after Ray Winstone's Beowulf repeatedly slams it in an oaken door? Not a problem. But as soon as Beowulf decides to fight Grendel in the buff, Zemeckis is at comical pains to plant upturned stools, goblets - anything he can think of short of a barber's pole - in front of his manly groin.

Angelina Jolie famously gets her digital kit off too, as a demonic embodiment of sexual allure. Great casting, as most straight male viewers agreed, but Jolie's motion-captured nipples remain modestly sheathed behind naggingly-immovable and opaque blobs of water.

As well as raising a few extra laughs in an already laughable film, this highlights the patently absurd belief that sex, which most of us do at some point in our lives, is somehow more threatening or shameful than murder, in which only a tiny part of the moviegoing public will ever - hopefully - take part.

As Jack Nicholson once put it: "Kiss a tit and you get an X rating. Cut a tit off, you're PG." Paradoxically, while Zemeckis upholds this double-standard, his dedication to 3-D technology may eventually bring it to an end.

The Financial Times is already predicting a huge upsurge in investment in 3-D film-making after Beowulf, although one analyst noticed that the techniques "won't work for every film".

One genre for which it seems a natural fit is porn, an industry which has been at the forefront of cinematic innovation - including the development of video, then DVD - since the 1970s. Cinema chains investing in expensive 3-D screens will be looking for product to fill them, and audiences will only be excited for so long by severed limbs spilling out of the screen. Can the world's first 3-D sex scene be far away?

Beowulf
Cert: 12A