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.

Comments

LOTR

[martingunnarsson]

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.

Re:LOTR

[misterpies]

I'm with you there. Leafing through the book after seeing the film, I was amazed out how much serious plot and character development they'd left out in what was after all an immensely long movie. Instead, RotK, even more so than TTT, was essentially a vehicle for massive set-piece battles. Battles that in the book take up a few paragraphs formed the bulk of the film, while whole subplots that made the book such an enveloping experience - e.g. Faramir and Eowyn - were dropped.

Where Jackson got it wrong is that LoTR was never meant as a simple heroes-overcome-the-odds story. It's an attempt to create an alternative world peopled by characters at all levels of society -- fantasy's answer to Proust and Balzac.

Clearly Peter Jackson thought that the complexity of the book was too much for your average cinema-going Joe. And he was probably right - but in thinking so he abandoned the humanity of the story. The siege of Minas Tirith is a good example of this. Tolkien describes the battle from the viewpoints of the citizenry and ordinary soldiers of Gondor; he gives no unified overview of the fighting, because (as a former soldier) he knew that it had little to do with the experience of war. Instead of oliphaunt-surfing Legolas, for example, Gimli gives a terse recounting of their arrival and participation in the battle only after it was all over.

The film, submitting to Hollywood logic, does away with all this. Films have heroes, and heroes - not ordinary people - win battles. The rest are reduced to orc-fodder. But this removes one of Tolkien's key themes, which is the dehumanising effect of war on an entire society. This applies especially to the scouring of the shire. The main action is over, therefore why complicate thigns? Give us a happy ending. But the point of the book was that there is no happy ending; nothing is as it was before, even in the Shire. Had Jackson merely left out the return to the Shire, I might have forgiven him a savage cut. But instead he gave it the worst sort of saccharine Hollywood ending. The final scene was the same as the book, true, but Sam's last words lost their resonance.

I know most people who saw the film won't agree with me. Many will respond that the complexity of the book had to be reduced to make it filmable. But if a book cannot be put on screen without ripping it apart, perhaps it should stay on paper. (It goes the other way, of course. Imagine the Matrix as a novel -- it could never convey the visual exhileration of the first film.)

Ironically, the rest of Tolkien's work apart from LoTR would be well suited to Jackson's approach. The Hobbit is a simple story with a small cast of characters. And the individual stories of the Silmarillion, again being fairly simple and (importantly) not fleshed out in so much detail, could actually gain from being put on screen.

CGI, huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

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)...

It's the *story* that makes it a good film.

[terremoto]

RotK clearly wouldn't have been much of a movie if the battle scenes hadn't been so good.

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.

CGI battling hords are cool

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Be entertained you whiney twits

[jcampbell]

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.

CG

[rhuntley12]

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.

Re:You know... things just don't amaze me.

[webroach]

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.

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...

...ANIMATED THROUGH MOTION CAPTURE.

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.

Re:Quality of RotK

[Sir0x0]

While the battle scenes were very eye appealing, I think that all of the actors did a wonderful job.

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.

Re:What was so good about the battles?

[iainl]

"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?

Trivialization of CGI artistry

[mlzman]

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.

Re:Your loss

[Anonymous Coward]

The books are better than the movies, Tolkien was a master at weaving intricate story lines.

Oh, please. I will bravely take the dissenting opinion here and say, in a clear voice, that "The Lord of the Rings" just ain't that great a book.

The language, with a few notable exceptions, is not beautiful. It's stilted and awkward, suitable for a professor but not for a storyteller. (The notable exceptions serve only to put the rest of the book in stark contrast.)

There's virtually no characterization, again with a few notable exceptions. The dialogue sounds so much like bad repertory theater that it's impossible to feel anything substantive for any of the characters.

The first part of the book takes a hundred bloody pages to get going, and as soon as it does, it takes a meaningless detour into Bombadilly silliness. It's blindingly obvious that Tolkien was trying to write another "Hobbit" for the first couple hundred pages of LOTR... and it didn't go well.

The Council of Elrond consists of dozens upon endless dozens of pages of people standing around talking. The battles of Helms Deep and the Pelenor Fields (did I spell that last one right?) are summed up in a couple pages each, and the battle of Isengard takes place entirely off-screen!

Let us not even mention the fact that the book ends in one of literature's great anticlimaxes. Saruman goes from being an aspiring ruler of Middle Earth to a petty irritant. His character is completely defused and disarmed, which is not a good payoff for dramatic suspense. The damned story ends two hundred pages before the book does.

All in all, I think Tolkien has been the recipient of more charity and good-will from his readers than any writer since Moses. The movies, while imperfect, have managed to scrape away the crap and uncover the story, a job Tolkien's editor *should have done* but didn't.