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Message in a Battle
The WP has a tale titled The Messages in a Battle about the recent growth of computer-generated battle scenes in movies, now that you don't have to pay all those extras. RotK clearly wouldn't have been much of a movie if the battle scenes hadn't been so good.
I don't normally comment on the editors like this, but did Micheal just make a very blatant and obvious troll comment?
Banaaaana!
I don't think the battle scenes were the highlight of the LOTR movies. Badly done battle scenes would have made the whole thing look bad, but *less* battle scenes wouldn't, in my opinion.
Martin
And here I thought that it was all the extras together with CGI that made the battle scenes in TTT and ROTK so special...
Call me a purist, but I still believe that CG should be used to enhance real scenes, not create them from scratch (unless it's a space movie or something similar)...
Perhaps it escaped your notice, but ROTK is a film of a book. A book that tells a great story. The battle scenes are just part of it.
I think that in movies (especially 'epic' style LOTR movies) you not only need them, but thats really the only way to show the scale and depth (and humanity?) of the story.
You're that guy to the left looking on a field full of 10,000+ orcs and other bad guys. What do you feel like? How does the story teller convey that?
I really like action movies, and I really enjoy them. They're fun and cool and easy to take. Personally, I hope to see more 'epic' styled movies. They're fun and cool, but also tragic, hopeful, and that the good guys don't always win, or not the way you might expect.
Ok, weirdness over.
How about anybody who can't enjoy a LOTR movie is a stuck up snot. So what if there's some "desensitization" going on. Why don't you just take movies for what they are: entertainment. BE ENTERTAINED. If you're looking for shakespearean dialogue and touching stories, go move near an independant movie theater and stopping taking up seats at my local theater so you can sneer and bark that movies me and every other human with a beating heart can enjoy. And if you can't find some deeper meaning in LOTR then, my friend, you are dense.
If there had not been those humorous moments in LOTR, it would have not have been a Peter Jackson movie. Maybe since I saw his portfolio of horror movies and laughed my bloody ass off before we even knew about LOTR, I have a greater appreciation. But frankly... grow a sense of humor, it's not hard.
While CG looks nice and all, it still is noticable that it's CG. There is definately something to be said for fight scenes using real people, even wirefighting looks good. As long as they make it look real. Look at crouching tiger hidden dragon, while I didn't care much for the fighting in the trees and on water, it still looked damn good. Also Kill Bill, while alot of people hated, the fighting was damn good, except for one quick scene in my mind. Personally, I prefer real actors to CG, even though it'd be hard to have a huge battle like that. If I remember right, and it's been awhile, Stargate the movie had a scene with around 2000 extras in a single battle.
Well, realistically they do not have a single purpose in battle, and usually doesn't happen. Then again we're talking a movie, you can't really give much background, or character development as books gives in even 4 hours. Somehow I think that the Gimli/Legolas example is used to show how they're eventually going to end up being great friends. It just seems a tad harder to show this in special segments due to the time alotted. It just makes it easier to show the strong bond between the two characters. And,if you really notice, there isn't at all much other small talk during the battle scenes.
I liked the jokes, they didn't seem gratuitous - they were always "in character". the rivalry between Gimli and Legolas is one of my favourite things, when they finally admit they're such good friends (ROTK: "die alongside an elf/friend") it's a fantastic moment and it wouldn't have been so good without the "jokes" - Gimli being too proud (TTT: "toss me, don't tell the elf") is a necessary part.
I would guess because 'they weren't very impressive'
They sure *looked* cool - but it was extremely easy to spot where CG actors were used for example - there were lots of closeups to a cg Neo that were *dire*
Really the biggest eyesore is CG people. I have yet to see something that really amazes me as it looks like a real person. To be honest, I found the closest being FF:Spirits Within. Crappy movie, but you have to admit the graphics were outstanding.
...ANIMATED THROUGH MOTION CAPTURE.
I'm assuming you're talking about the way CG people move, which is (sadly) not very often convincing. And though I agree that the characters in FF:TSW were completely believeable, they were also....
wait for it...
Compared to Weta's Massive, which animates everything on the fly (ok, granted, using motion capture clips which the animation team tweaked), FF:TSW technique is stone age. So give them a bit of credit for at least trying to further the art....
Why is it that people can't just sit down and enjoy a movie anymore? All we hear is "I could tell the trucks on the highway in the Matrix weren't real" and "Boy, I'm sure not impressed by those 250,000 orcs attacking. It's clearly not real."
Watch the movie. Talk about the story. Appreciate the effort that went into trying to entertain your nit-picking self.
Agreed, and in fact I think that the acting job done in the battles themselves were integral as well. The wonderful effects would have been wasted had the acting been bad. Theoden's (Bernard Hill) speech, Gandalf's (Sir Ian McKellan) frantic command, even the desperate and controlled actions of Eomer (Karl Urban). Jackson and his team backed up solid moviemaking with solid visual effects, instead of relying on the Ooohs and Aaahs of the audience. That was why the battles were so appealing.
I would venture that either you consider both sexes equally exploited in porn - or you consider neither of the sexes exploited. Seems to me men and woman face the same choice before getting involved in the porn industry.
Both are portrayed as huge, chugging, ever-hungry slabs of meat (which is fine given that this is after all what porn is about). I fail to see why porn exploits women any more in that situation than it does men.
I think you're watching the movie with too much critizism : I'd bet my left leg that, if they somehow could remake the battle scenes WITHOUT CG, and showed both real & CG films to many large audiences, on average folks would in both theaters pretend they did recognized CG artifacts and scenes which were clearly computer generated.
The reason my friend, is that you're looking at things which can not exist in our world. They are so far beyond the borders of common daydream imagination that you have the reflex to criticize the reality. How much easier can one do so than by claming the CG stuff is 'unnatural' and 'artifical' and could have been done better ?
(Note : expect lame jokes below about daydream imagination.)
When will I end this grieving ? When will my future begin ?
The only thing that stands out as truly impressive was the highway chase scene in Reloaded. The much touted "untoppable" 25 min end sequence turned out to be really crappy. Oooo, look, there is some fake-mech-looking -walking-things shooting at 10,000,000,000,000 squiddies, for 25 min. straight Yeah!!! The first Matrix felt real and looked real and also had a different tone. The sequels looked and felt like cartoons and the movie "played" like a video game.
"Jeremy, you need to get to an internet cafe and cut and paste some appropriate sentiments about me from the world wide
For the past several years, I have had this difficulty - I'll be totally "into" a movie, and then the action scene starts, and I immediatly fall into a movie-induced trance (sleep).
I am not joking. Not sure if this is a side effect of age (just over 40), LASIK, or too much time spent on Slashdot, but it's getting frustrating.
I have tried to watch the original LOTR no less than thirteen times. In the theater, rented the VHS, bought the DVD. I still can't see it, and haven't made it past the FIRST major animated action sequence. The last time, I finally advanced the movie past the first one, and fell asleep on the second one.
Same thing for EVERY major movie with lots of action and computer generated animation. Fell asleep at Matrix 2 and 3, 2 Fast 2 Furious, etc. These are all movies that I WANT TO SEE, so it's not a lack of interest!
Doc,.. someone.... help!! Ease up on the computer animated graphics - These naps are getting expensive!
I think you assumed something you shouldn't have. I do not dislike movies for how horrible they are. I'm much more interested in the story, but really, this entire article is about CG so it should be expected that many would comment on CG in movies and not really the story. I love the LOTR movies personally, but CG is still flawed and needs work. It's great for certain situations "far off shots of humans in which there are thousands to create" but sometimes it can be a bit of a bother.
One thing I missed in the movies was that while we could see the fighters in full digital glory, you couldn't see, say, the elves of Rivendell and Lothlorien going about their lives (prior to departing.) Or the forests moving.
... but it would have been nice.
Those would probably have been harder to do than the battles, so I can't really blame them for not including those
"None of the battle scenes impressed me. I mean this was no matrix or crouching tiger hidden dragon. The battle scenes were typical CG crap."
Leaving aside the obvious troll answer of just how monumentally dire the CG 'defense of Zion' scenes were in Matrix Revolutions, and for that matter the 'burly brawl' in Reloaded, there is a very big difference here.
The above two films had stunning one-on-one fights by fighters with (for one reason or another) supernatural abilities. The main battle scenes in Return Of The King are all about open warfare between ranks of blokes and orcs. No-one would bother arguing the relative merits of Warcraft and Soul Calibur as they are so very different, so why complain about their film equivalents?
"I Know You Are But What Am I?"
I read the LoTR when I was 8, and the battle scenes were clear and vivid at the time. The key to making good battle scenes (whether through CGI or using live actors) is to convey the emotions of the situation: boredom, panic, horror, terror, panic, glee, euphoria, insanity. The best way to express these emotions is to use shadows and hints, not full frontal gore.
"Master and Commander" was so good in parts because it did this - as the writer of the article says, the first battle scene in which flashes of light in the distant fog are the visual warning of deadly accurate incoming cannon shots. Hiding the enemy and showing only shadows makes it much more fightning and effective..
Battlescene CGI has, thankfully, matured a little from the "see what I can do" phase, and directors can now direct it in more subtle ways than simply creating realistic hordes.
I don't believe the staged battles and CGI effects were the key to making the LoTR movies more successful, in fact the special effects were quite often boring and impersonal. Flying lizards, mutant elephants, walking trees... OK, curious to look at, but hardly terrifying. And the walking trees and dawrf jokes were just silly.
I'm looking forward to the time when more creative and intuitive directors turn CGI in something more subtle than a "look what I can do" toy.
Ceci n'est pas une signature
The books are better than the movies, Tolkien was a master at weaving intricate story lines. Some of those translated to the screen and others were left out in the intrest of keeping the audiences interest. As an example, it may have taken an additional hour for the first movie to include the whole Tom Bombadil section.
I think that Jackson, et al have done a great job of condensing the story enough to make the three segmented movie. The books are highly recommended.
Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see. - Mark Twain
Before you go ranting about CG - as some are doing just now - beware.
OK, 50 meter high elefant creatures. They ought to be CG. But I doubt that real 50 meter high elefant creatures would look that much different. Yeah, horses wouldn't charge into orkish infantry that way, but you ought to know that those are special middle earth horses and real middle earth orks, and they react that way to one-another. I just guess Peter Jackson and his team did a scene that would look coolest.
I consider myself somewhat familiar with the capabilities of CG, and was somewhat upset about how very 'CG' some scenes in the updated 1st Star Wars Trilogy were. What really suprised me was to find out that the scenes I thought were bad CG were in fact real shots of real things.
That being said, for someone who has a knack at CG I though those scenes where I can definitley tell they actually were CG (f.e. giant trolls smashing Minas Tirit Knights left, right and center) were absofuckinlutely awesome. If there were real trolls in this world, it wouldn't have looked any more impressive, that's for sure.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
I'm with you on that...
Although, you notice in RotK, the spear men set themselves up properly against a calvary charge (speares blaneted, angled to meet the charge)... after that, they're nowhere to be found... it's archers in front.
Though, what bothered me more was the whole mounted calvary charge against a fortrified city...
And why didn't the defenders do something to set fire to the siege towers? They were only wood after all...
The Matrix revolutions effects were just annoying. They had too much of everything in a bad way. LOTR had loads and loads of soldiers, but everything still looked realistic. In Matrix it was just a mess.
Martin
I liked the jokes, they didn't seem gratuitous - they were always "in character"
...)
I don't agree. I really liked "The Two Towers", and the jokes would have been fine if
1. It wasn't *once again* some kind of old dwarf joke,
2. said jokes were in the book (maybe I'm wrong, and it IS in the book, but I can't remember them), and
3. Legolas did something funny (but no, NO ! A dwarf may - no, MUST - be comical, but not a noble Elf
But that wasn't the case.
Maybe I'm a fanatic (I don't think so, I like TLOTR, but I don't dream about it), but if so, it's all about details. When Legolas tells Gimli that he killed 17 orcs while Gimli got only 2, it IS fun. But then gimli catches up, and scores more than Legolas, who accepts his "defeat", and then it is fun again !
My point is that there is some humor in the books, and that it has been twisted into some grotesque joke at the expense of the dwarves.
That's true-the argument that porn exploits women is rather disingenuous. If we exclude truly exploitative material (for example, voyeur porn where the subjects don't know they're being taped-"When you bend over, you never know who's watching!!!"), it becomes clear that the "poor exploited women" and "abusive male patriarchy" claims are mere political tools.
:P
Modern feminism has grown so radical and dogmatic that many women feel feminist ideas restrict and oppress them. To enjoy oneself as a woman with a libido is a counterrevolutionary act against the feminist cause. How is this paradox possible? Isn't feminism about liberation? Not anymore. Now that women have nearly equal rights, feminists are engaged in an ideological power struggle with the goals of ego-masturbation and attention whoring. How many supposedly idealistic protesters these days come off as attention whores when you look beyond their rhetoric? How many of the most rabid and vociferous ones just want to be leaders, and they found a convenient cause which they can milk like a juicy breast for all the glory and power it's worth?
With this background understood, it becomes clear why the forces of political correctness assail porn as "exploitation of women." Nobody cares about the woman in the movie, fuck her-in fact, the existence of a woman in the movie is irrelevant. Only the idea matters; a written erotic story would be just as "exploitative" as a hardcore donkey bukkake film if it had as broad an audience, rather than an audience of just a few broads. To the politically correct, porn is not sexual entertainment but rather a political manifesto. A manifesto arguing in favor of hedonism; a demonstration of how enjoyable lack of inhibition can be. Those huge, chugging, ever-hungry slabs of meat pay no attention to ideology and propriety, and therefore they cannot be manipulated by those means. Without guilt trips to lay on people, the politically correct attention whores won't get any attention. They will fade into irrelevancy and impotency.
That is what so-called feminists are really afraid of, and that's why they're always picking fights and flinging flamebait while actually increasing the subtle restrictions society places on women. If everyone becomes too comfortable with watching a cgi woman doing sexy things to herself, we might just stop worrying about how "dirty" and "guilty" and "offensive" sex is. God forbid that a girl could ever get laid without feeling like a shameful slut! She might not need her feminist overlords to set her back on the right-thinking, independent, non-exploited path! I, for one, welcome my new computer generated nymphomaniac sisters. For one thing, they'll always be in the mood to entertain my date when I'm not, and I don't even have to be jealous that they're thinner than me because they're not real
That's an interesting point.
It reminds me of my reaction to the footage of the planes crashing into the World Trade Center. Honestly, I thought it looked like bad B-Movie special-effects. The real-life footage just didn't look like what I would have imagined the scene to look like.
Once you get so far beyond every day experience, you can't trust yourself to know what looks real and what doesn't.
It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail. - Abraham Maslow
But most movies today are built wholly around the FX and CGI, so what are we supposed to talk about when those suck?
Perhaps you should stop watching crappy movies that are built around FX and CGI then?
Seriously. Go to IMDB and take a look. Plenty of the top 250 have NO CGI. And just because a movie is there doesn't mean you have to go watch it. Unless you feel like spending $8.50 to have something to complain about.
perhaps a way to computer generate decent plot lines is the next step in movie evolution.
No, I think the next step is to develop movie-goers who are smart enough to be offended by crappy stories. Offended enough to stop feeding the studios cash for movies like "The Santa Clause 2".
artificial bloopers, a concept of the future indeed!
Hmm.. Dunno about that, Monsters Inc. has artificial bloopers at the end, and that movie was 100% CG.
The thing that bothers me about the Post article was the author's flippant suggestions that it is easy to create the huge, brilliantly realized battle sequences he mentions. I'm no expert, but I suspect it takes a lot more than just "two technicians in a computer bunker."
Of the movies he mentions, I have only seen Return of the King. In that movie alone I would imagine that it took a large and talented team of artists, designers, actors, engineers, writers, etc.--not to mention a director with vision--to pull it off. It's sad that the author, one of the Post's movie critics, doesn't express much appreciation or gratitude for the human creativity that makes these scenes possible.
Is this a common attitude? Perhaps I'm mistaken; maybe its easy to seamlessly incorporate large-scale computer generated action into films, but I'd be shocked if it were as simple as Mr. Hunter suggests.
Of which probably the most interesting, and the one about to become hotly debated, is: Is a cgi child doing sexy things to itself for the entertainment of others still utterly wrong, when no actual child was involved in the production of the `child porn'?
It's amazing to me how many people try to portray Tolkien's universe as morally simplistic. His thinking is black and white in the sense that he rejects moral relativism. However, his characters are shot through with ambiguity, at least on careful reading.
Is Boromir good or evil? How about Saruman? How about Sam? How about Denethor? How about Frodo? How about Gollum? How about Galadriel? You can easily state on what side each one mostly falls, but there is nuance there.
The movies "flatten" many of these characters to some extent, so some of that nuance is lost, but not all.
Regarding the article's argument that The Lord of the Rings demonizes the enemy, I think the following quote from The Two Towers certainly gives it the lie.
The Two Towers Extended Edition includes this scene, though it's Faramir who expresses the sentiments.
I don't know how one can read such scenes and argue that Tolkien advocates a demonification of enemies.
Or perhaps the explanation is that one doesn't read at all...
Do not speak unless you can improve on the silence.
Agreed. But still, when I watch The Two Towers and see those ground-level side shots of the approaching orc army and realize absolutely nothing in that shot is real except the ground they're walking on, I can't help but be impressed. They look real to me. Even the orcs climbing the ladders were CG. In fact, those ground-level side shots actually started as Massive visual tests! Peter Jackson decided to use them in the movie.
You have to keep in mind that seeing 100,000 enemies battling just won't look real no matter what you do, because you've never really seen 100,000 battling orcs up close like that. You must remember that a large number of things in real life also look "unreal" when you actually see them, and I don't doubt that the reason is the same. You just don't see it everyday!
"Sufferin' succotash."
When Gimli said those things, the audience laughed. When Legolas "snowboarded" down the stairs on his shield, the audience cheered.
It was fun. It's a movie, remember? The only movie that topped the fun of The Two Towers for me was Return of the King. Seeing Legolas drop an oliphaunt, and Gimli's resulting comment, made that moment memorable for every member of the audience who were with me that night. It was a great movie with fun character moments to offset the dreary doom. You cheered when your heroes showed up.
You know, Tolkien did have whimsical comedic moments in the books, some that made it into the movies and some that didn't.
"Sufferin' succotash."
it's a bit hard to have an ultimate "good vs evil" struggle without a major conflict or two.
Lord of the Rings was not an ultimate "good vs evil" struggle.
The movies recast it as one, and it's understandable that a filmmaker aiming for a large audience would do this, but that's not what the book was about. In actuality, the "moral" of the story is that there is no such thing as ultimate evil, even if something may appear to be so for a time.
Man, if you hate goofy, comical dwarves, stay far away from the The Hobbit, the prequel to the LOTR books.
"Sufferin' succotash."
I wrote an essay almost on this subject, about whether or not it should be illegal. I wrote it from a US of A standpoint, considering the first amendment. I won't pretend that it's full of deep thought or anything. I spoke in defense of virtual child pornography. You can read my essay here on livejournal. (I'm too cheap to pay for hosting on top of my cable internet access, and I don't have a static IP at home because comcast is stingy like that.)
Though I only really address the issue of legality in the article, I personally believe that virtual child porn is a good thing in some ways. You are not going to stop pedophilia by outlawing all the sexual outlets of those who are pedophiles. It is my opinion that by doing so you will actually increase the crimes committed by pedophiles by denying them their outlet. But, enough here, read my lj if you want more. And I am more than willing to debate the issue there rather than here, though you will need to be a registered user to comment in my lj (Some poser posted a nasty reply to one of my rants which didn't even address the issues, just so they could call me a dick, so I had to remove anonymous posting.)
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
You are correct that if they break the line cavalry are very good at breaking ranks.
The enemy didn't even have a line. It was a suprise attack to the rear of an engaged army. They had little time to turn and face the new foe. The weak line they hastily formed was not nearly as strong as what the orcs would've presented if they'd been meeting the Rohirrim head-on.
One Waterloo cavalryman reported,
Bringing up Waterloo shows how irrelevant your references are. LOTR is not in an 1800s-level world, where infantry carry guns. It's at maybe a 1200s level of technology.
By 1750, the time of cavalry was ending, because a horseman with a carbine would lose to an infantryman with a rifle. Being on a horse makes you both easier to target, and less accurate with your own shots. (It took another 100 years for rifles to become common enough that cavalry was completely dead)
But before the rise of the gun, armored horsmen were a powerful force. And before the coming of the English longbow and the Germanic pike, they were unbeatable. Look at orcs- they can't use either of those weapons effectively. They lack the eyesight and dexterity to be good bowmen, and they completely lack the discipline to hold pikes in a line. (In this world, only the elves or Urukhai can shoot like an Agincourt bowman)
So the enemy had no counter to cavalry charges, except force of numbers and giant monsters.
I am so grateful that this reviewer took it upon himself to decode the real meaning encoded in the RotK battles for all of us ignorant non-semioticians. Now that I know, I can feel real guilty about rooting for the good guys, because war is always wrong.
No mention of the other "messages" in this battle: reflections of J.R.R.T.'s real-world experience of the horrors of WWI trench warfare; the concept that, even in this age of relativism, there are some things worth fighting for; the cost of war; etc.
Of course, it's nice to criticize a movie that, though rendered in color, still plays in moral black-and-white. Thus one hallmark of the modern movie critic is to snipe at any attempt to portray notions of absolute good and evil, combined with moral righteousness. It's better that way, don't you think? It's certainly easier. ;-)
For an interesting counter-arguement, check out this, an essay by writer Gene Wolfe (who, btw, wrote a series of books, known as "The Book of the New Sun," as fantastic as Tolkien's but in a different way).
Swordforum has two articles about the people who created the swords for LOTR and "invented" the martial arts of the different races in the movie. Enjoy!
From "The Messages in a Battle" article:
...No nukes, no M-16s, no RPGs, no complications of gender, ethnicity, creed or race, like our messy modern affairs. Also, no ambiguity, no peace marches, no talking heads or torrential blogs zigging this way and that ideologically. No sir. In those days, even if those days are set in an Oxford don's fantasy life, war was war, war was man's business, up was up, down was down, enemies were demons, and best of all, killing them was holy work about which no one had to be guilty...
Yup, those were the days! Men were real men, women were real women and the little furry creatures from Alpha Centaury were real little furry etc...
It's not Western only, it's universal. I'm an East European, from the Balkans actually, and this motive (us vs. the alien hordes) flows throughout our history. As trough anybody's history, I guess. No?