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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.
While the battle scenes were very eye appealing, I think that all of the actors did a wonderful job. Sean Astin (not sure on the last name) was so convincing as Sam, it was breathtaking. Not to mention Magne....errrr Gandalf (portrayed by Sir Ian McKellan) really had the presence to convince me that he was both wise and powerful. Anyway, I just felt that yeah, the battles were pretty, and it would be hard to have the LotR without a war going on, I still don't think the movie was made by those sequences.
--fetch daddy's blue fright wig, i must be handsome when i release my rage
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
How is it that both Matrix films were un-nominated for visual effects Oscars? While I can understand discriminating against them because of their relative unpopularity, I can't imagine that their visual effects were considered less spectacular. Yet another reason to hate awards shows, I suppose.
Despite how much work and how amazing these CG segments are for the current time period. I have yet to be impressed. I guess until I can actually not tell the difference, or at least only subtle differences, between real an fake. I'll be happy.
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 guess my standards are just too high.
If they didn't have all of the ridiculously lame dwarf comedy ("nobody tosses a dwarf", "toss me", etc.) and if Legolas hadn't snowboarded down the stairs on his shield. For a movie with such a realistic look to it, those elements of the battles, especially Helms Deep, were totally unneccessary and really ruined the great ambience that the thousands of CG extras created so effectively.
Why must directors put such painfully lame moments in films, anyway? It's like in Minority Report, when Tom Cruise is fighting the other guy wearing a jet pack and they 'accidentally' cook the hamburgers on the grill to perfection... why? WHY???!
Read Pynchon.
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.
You wasted your karma bonus on _THAT_????
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.
We have all these movies now where CG-generated characters are used to fight and kill each other in every gory fashion imaginable, but why don't we have any movies where thousands of people get together and make love, not war? A massive orgy comprising of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, CG-generated characters in the scope and scale of Lord of the Rings would be an unforgettable moment in moviemaking history. Perhaps it would inspire the nations of Europe to solve their rapid depopulation problem -- we could have a summer of love all over again.
I was quite disappointed when that scene in the Matrix 2 turned out to be a mere scantily clad rave in a cave, all done with paid actors.
RotK clearly wouldn't have been much of a movie if the battle scenes hadn't been so good.
Duh. And in other news, Titanic wouldn't have been much of a movie if the ship hadn't sunk, Pearl Harbor wouldn't have been much of a movie if the Japanese hadn't attacked and X-Men would have been pretty bad if none of the characters had special powers.
Sure, there are a couple of hobbits winding their way to Mount Doom but Lord Of The Rings was always about epic battles - it's a bit hard to have an ultimate "good vs evil" struggle without a major conflict or two.
When people talk about these movies, they they talk about the battles within the mines of Moria, at Helm's Deep, at Isengard, and at Minas Tirith. They don't talk about Gandalf's fireworks at the Shire, or Frodo vs Gollum at the volcano's mouth. It's the major fight scenes that get us talking and it's those fight scenes where the real money is spent.
Of course Return Of The King wouldn't have been much of a movie if the battle scenes hadn't been so good. Neither would any major sci-fi or fantasy film you care to mention if equally bereft of seriously meaty action. Duh.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
In my own personal opinion, I think the writer of the article didn't pay attention to the movies. (esp. LOTR: all three)
.02.
With that, I'll say his opinion is lame.
Thats my thought..er,
'/dev/wit' is not available.
Your use. . . :P
lol...xlnt. That's what happens when I can't decide what to say.
This from an AC at (of time of writing) +4 :)
Is a cgi woman doing sexy things to herself for the entertainment of others still exploitation of women, when no specific woman is being exploited?
Down this path are all sorts of questions...
Forget the CGI actors. Ignore (if you can) the comedy dwarf tossing. My biggest complaint about the battle sequences is the hideous lack of strategy the leaders seem to have. I don't care who you are: a cavalry charge against a huge rank of spearmen is not a smart idea, and we see it happen at least twice in the series. And charging headlong at rampaging Oliphaunts? You deserve to be crushed underfoot. Swing out and take them from the flank, perhaps?
++ Say to Elrond "Hello.".
Elrond says "No.". Elrond gives you some lunch.
The effects are absolutely incredible, although there's only one girl and about a thousand guys.
Everything just looked real. The crew had taken care to make all effects completely transparent, even down to the KY Jelly shine.
Let me know and I'll try and see if I can find a URL for it... but you can also look for it yourself on Emule. Seems to work for all the people I've talked to.
You are an asshole.
"Return of the King would not have been much of a movie without the battles." Bullshit! The amount of artistry put into all three movies has not been seen since the days of "Cleopatra." I am no blind Tolkien freak either. All three movies were beautiful all around. In terms of cost, ROTK cost only $95 million. Contrast that with the recently released "chick flick," "Mona Lisa Smile," what cost $65 million to make and "The Last Samurai" who's costs totalled almost $140 million dollars. The Last Samurai's battle scenes were rather bland and extremely pale in comparison to ROTK. ROTK was just more than the battles, it had a lot of shit going on everywhere in middle earth. I am amazed that Peter Jackson and Co. completed the movie in less than a year, no other Hollywood director or studio could have made ROTK better than WETA and Peter Jackson. Saying ROTK would have sucked without the battles, is like saying Jedi would have sucked without any space battles. Stupid thing to say.
"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!
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
UNUSED AUDIO COMMENTARY BY HOWARD ZINN AND NOAM CHOMSKY, RECORDED SUMMER 2002, FOR THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING (Platinum Series Extended Edition)DVD, Part One
Part Two
A sample:
A bit more:
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
One thing I really give credit to the LotR trilogy for is their casting. There are virtually no "big-name" actors in any of the movies. While there are the better known stars, Sir Ian McKellan, Elijah Wood, Hugo Weaving, Cate Blanchett and even Liv Tyler and Sean Bean, none of them overpower the other cast members to the point of obscurity.
Furthermore, they found some actors from relative obscurity (Merry and Pippin come to mind) who perform remarkably well. Every single character in the LotR series is acted out almost flawlessly, and I for one can clearly relate their on screen portrayals to those characters from the book. And that's certainly what makes the battle scenes that much more *real* and closer to home. Someone watching the movie can really get a feel for the characters and sympathize with them. No character gets lost behind the face of some huge actor and no one actor steals the show from any other.
As for the CGI effects, I had no trouble believing that those oliphaunts and huge armies of Orcs were real, they might as well have been. The graphics were more than convincing enough and the fact that the movie is indeed in a fantasy setting allows for what Samuel Taylor Coleridge coined the "willful suspension of belief." I had a harder time believing that Tom Cruise's character could take out four or five samurai before even getting any samurai training.... not to mention he somehow managed to hold them off with a flagpole of all things...
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
Camera zooms in on and swoops past the walls of Helms Deep, which is full of 'orcs' that look suspicious like cardboard standees. The orcs stand side by side, leaving an empty space in the middle of the crowd. At one end stands Aragorn, sword in hand, wearing a long black tunic. At the other end, stands the King Orc, clearly identifiable by the saucy party hat he wears.
Aragorn: It ends tonight.
King Orc:I know it does. We already know I'm the one who beats you. That's why the rest of us are just going to enjoy the show. Grrgh.
They they fight, in a big battle scene would be ludicrously expensive if not for the fact Sam's head is in the way of the camera so only the occasional 'You swine!' is heard. A few moments later, Aragorneo's victory cry is heard. Close up on a shot of the Orc's party hat drifting poignantly to the ground. End scene.
Admit it... what you really wanted to say was:
You are an asshole
Agree. Also the story of the Lord of the Rings trilogy is taken from a certain book written by J.R.R. Tolkien which he finished in 1950 and which was split into three parts by the publisher. I fail to see why a big battle in a book that old has to do with the rest of the movies mentioned.
If you read it you will find the battle to be much more gigantic than any movie could ever depict. Argue about the other movies, leave the LotR trilogy out of play.
it's not about mimicking reality, it's about believability
What got me was all the parents bringing 5 year olds and younger to see the film despite it being a 12.
We're *not* talking Harry Potter or Peter Pan here, there's massive amounts of blood and guts but they seemed to think fantasy equals gentle fairy story. About half of them were led out in tears.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
Back in my day all the special effects were done by puppets, and we liked it!
The Moore-Murphy Law: The number of things that will go wrong will double every 2 years.
Yep, and they even turned the game into a pretty good TV programme, too: http://www.totalwar.com/time.htm
is how it trys to portray LOTR as warmongering, which means he absoutely missed the point... "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. It's nice to deal with a war that, though rendered in color, still plays in moral black-and-white. Thus one hallmark of the modern old-fashioned war movie is a high body count, combined with moral righteousness. It's better that way, don't you think? It's certainly easier." Wrong. LOTR is all about how war can be forced upon a society and you MUST fight. But once the battle begins, noble intentions and ideals are thrown out the window. Neither the men, elves, dwarves, or orcs are any less brutal or more noble once the fighting begins. There comes a time when in order to preserve your freedom, you must become your enemy, you must embrace evil in order to defeat it. And then, victory or defeat, you will have lost something. They were all changed by the war, and none of them for the better. The scene at the end where the Hobbits were sitting in the old bar and give each other a look and a half-hearted toast...THAT is the point of the movies. You are forced into a battle you don't want, you have to become savage and do things you would never have imagined doing before, and then at the end of the day once you can return to your lives, you find that you can't. Your old life, the life you fought for, is gone. It isn't about black and white. It is about how what looks to be black and white is only a million shades of gray.
Was that night on the marge of Lake LaBarge I cremated Sam McGee...
It sure seems like he couldn't have been bothered to read it. The bulk of the article has next to nothing to do with CGI. It's mostly about the glut of current movies having large scale warfare in them, be they produced with computers or an army of extras.
Could the article have been more misleading?
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These films, you may have noticed, all are built on old methods of warfare, back when the movies thought war was fun and heroic. 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.
I see he didn't watch LOTR, where much of the plot of the movie was convincing everyone to fight, not to mention that the single most important battlefield event in the movie took place outside the parameters established above.
who are those slashdot people? they swept over like Mongol-Tartars.
A few months ago, I was in my local theater waiting for the movie to start. The lights dim. The screen flickers. And where we usually start with a selection of previews for movies the studios would like us to see... I was treated to 20 mins of commercials (another rant for a different time).
At the tail end of these commercials was a heartening look at an industry stuntman. He talked about movies. He talked about his work. He talked about the risks he and his fellow stuntmen take to bring us exciting action in the movies. And he warned us that when we download a movie, we're stealing from him. Yep. Download a movie and you've all but made his work... his risks... his sacrifice worthless.
The message is clear. The MPAA wants us to know that downloading movies eliminates jobs. It hurts people like this particular stuntman. It takes away his job. Downloading is theft.
Of course, we have to wonder what this stuntman thinks about the massive battle scenes in the Lord of the Rings series. Sure. Motion capture plays a heavy part in the current technology. But you only need so many stuntment in a digital studio to generate the data needed for that. And what about the day when motion capture is no longer needed - when the actions of generic stunts have been long since captured, added to a database, and available on CDROM/DVD for a few hundred dollars? What happens to the job of the noble stuntman?
It seems that CGI too, is theft.
Or not.
It's the fucking movie biz! If the scene calls for a "Really big battle" then that's what it's going to get!
Would RoTK suffer from not having those battle scenes put in...? Yes. Would "The Ten Commandments" suffer if it were not for it's "epic" scale and all those extras...? Yes!
You think that given the chance that the OldSkool directors would have used all those extras and all that money (in those days)!
What was I talking about?... Oh yeah! The writer...
Sometimes you use what you can because you have it available because your story lacks substance. Or, you use it because there is no way in hell that you're going to hire 100,000 extras to do a battle scene.
I mean c'mon! I don't even think that there are 100,000 people that can act in New Zealand
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.
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
I just felt that yeah, the battles were pretty
:-)
The battle scene was three hours long, and yes it was a good one
now that you don't have to pay all those extras.
But they did still have to pay extras for the LoTR trilogy, thousands of them in fact
Casual Games/Downloads
Have you READ the LOTR trilogy? Or any of the other side-books? In the world of Middle-Earth, etc, magic isn't something simply and easily conjured up (like it is in some roll-playing games) at a whim. It apparently takes/took a lot of preparation, concentration, effort. It didn't just fall out of a staff or finger tip whenever you needed it. I LIKED that about the whole LOTR story. It is simply too easy to make the magic simple and overuse it. Why have armies or soldiers at all when all you need is a wizard to sling magic fireballs or lightening at an enemy?
You seem to complain because magic didn't play a larger role in LOTRs. Be thankful. It makes for a better, more interesting story. Recall, if you will, the Knights of the Round Table and their great wizard Merlin. He was a Gandalf of sorts, a very powerful wizard, yet he didn't bring forth constant walls of flame, fireballs, lightening, etc, and thus make himself the equivalent to an entire army. He (apparently) had to ration his magic and it took energy to wield it. Better story that way.
If it is so easy, then it merely becomes a child's game/story...like so many computer role playing games.
In Bushworld, they struggle to keep church and state separate in Iraq as they increasingly merge the two in America.
I think this is a repeat of the lessons we've learned with synthesizers in music and fonts/colors in documents. At first, everyone feels compelled to use them, the result being judged by the quantity of the effect, then eventually we return to the base skill. Documents rarely use 10 fonts or colors these days. Well, music is still sometimes about who can make the weirdest sound, but some are finally returning to making good music.
And a good flamebait and troll question is one that was hotly debated for over a week in a law class this semister:
Should CGI child porn be legal?
(is it exploiting children if there was never a child involved to begin with?)
Don't bother replying, as there is no side of the debate that I haven't heard in excruciating detail. If you think it is a hot topic for discussion or you have some uniuqe insite, send it to ask-slashdot.
It is a sad testament to our times that this topic would even come up in a criminal law textbook.
Her performance in the scene with the witch king was quite good and right in sync with the feeling I got from the books. Bravo!
I think the major reason why we're seeing a major return of "epic" films is the fact with modern CGI technology you can replicate things like major battle scenes or crowd scenes relatively cheaply.
Does anyone remember Cleopatra (1962), which essentially bankrupted 20th Century Fox because of its US$44 million cost in 1962 dollars? (That would be equivalent of around US$500 million in 2003.) Some of the scenes in that movie was exorbitantly expensive to do, especially the scene of Cleopatra entering Rome (everything you saw on-screen was REAL, including that huge background crowd). Today, that scene would be done mostly with blue-screened sets and CGI-generated backgrounds, which is vastly less expensive to do (remember Gladiator from a couple of years ago?).
It is the development of high-quality CGI that made the Lord of the Rings movies look so "epic" in the first place.
You'd think they would appreciate all the money they saved and the extra profits they generated by at least giving a passing nod to what made it all possible: Linux
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
It sounds like you have played some of the MMORPGs out there where a wizard can dish out more damage than 5 warriors in full battle kit.
Magic was not comonplace in middle earth - it was, well, magical!
From the article:
Neither Kurosawa nor Zwick "thought it up". These banners are called sashimono, and they were affixed to the back, not the helmet. Sorry to nitpick, but a little research effort on the part of a writer for a major news outlet would be appreciated.
--
bachiatari na torisetsu o yome!
Gandalf, Sauruman and the other Istari were forbidden to directly interfer. (A wizard prime directive?) They idea is that men should take charge of their own lives and the powerful Maia/Istari/Angels/etc... should help guide them but not fight their battles for them. This is the reason that Gandalf couldn't just say "hey Biblo, give me the ring and I'll drop it in Mt. Doom the next time Sauron and I have a poker night."
I despise michael and his neverending interjections of opinion in his postings like everyone else does, but even I saw that he was being sarcastic.
Still, I don't know why CmdrTaco lets him post things like that, sarcastic or not, because it only serves to disrupt the comments after the article as we discuss what he meant.
"Sufferin' succotash."
I liked the movies, but I found it annoying that most of the battle scenes looked as if they were shot about 2 feet away from the action.
I would have rather scene some wider shots of the battle instead of two or people right in your face fighting it out. It all flashes by too fast then. It does help to relay the idea that war is chaos...makes you wonder how much "friendly fire" there is, but on screen it is just a blur.
You're never not going to be able to tell the difference, because a 500 year old creature shrivelled from an evil ring is just something you don't see in real life, so it's easy to spot as CG. Also, Balrogs, massive Dwarven cities, and more. You know they can't exist.
However, I bet there are tons of shots in the LOTR movies you didn't even know weren't CG, so you're complaining without realizing you've already been had. For instance, the characters running across the bridge in Moria weren't real. Or the rotating shot of the ruins that the fellowship walks by. Several shots of the ring itself. And there are a lot of uses of Massive that people didn't necessarily realize, such as an overhead shot of Helm's Deep right before Aragorn speaks to Theoden about calling for aid, in which the entire lower level of the set is computer-generated, complete with human populace. Not to mention all the lighting, weather change, and backdrops of almost every shot, which were done with computers.
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.
You've got to be joking. The most realistic CG human face I've ever seen is the slow-motion punch in Matrix Revolutions. None of that was real. Also, a lot of the cloned Smiths in Matrix Reloaded were stunt people with CG Smith faces pasted on them. You probably never noticed.
"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."
Hey Michael, how about you shut the fuck up about what ROTK "clearly" was or was not? I didn't come here to read your whiny little editorials.
Actually... why DID I come here?
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PGP Key ID 0xCB8FF658
Man, if you hate goofy, comical dwarves, stay far away from the The Hobbit, the prequel to the LOTR books.
"Sufferin' succotash."
Gandalf barely touched the ring once and ended up having to smoke a bowl to get over it, and even then he was sitting there sucking on his pipe and muttering "my precious" when frodo showed up. (I don't recall precisely how that went in the movie, but Gandalf was also quite insistent there that Frodo not give the thing to him, I remember that much. Jackson fiddled the story a lot but the major points are intact.)
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
When I was watching the movies I noticed that many of the soldier's motion seemed very mechanical. Especially at Helm's Deep, there is at least one archer whose motions are clearly not fluid as a human's. This was duplicated at throughout the movie and Return of the King.
Course, this is better than having six extras in a battle, or copy/pasting the same people over and over.
Sauron was weak because he'd lost the ring. In order to give the ring the power to control the other rings of power, Sauron had to pour nearly all of his own power and malice into it.
This is a theme that runs through the LOTR as well as the Silmarillion. Beings of power which use their power for domination, have to spend that power on the things they dominate. Their own personal power diminishes. Thus, Sauron is greatly weakened when the ring is cut off his finger the first time, and he is reduced to nothing but a powerless shadow when the ring is actually destroyed.
Likewise, Saruman's personal power is spent on the command and control of his army, such that when his armies are defeated, he's not much more than a pale imitation of his former self, unable to do anything other than use the honey-sweet charm of his voice. No more magic, no more staff.
Gandalf was not muttering My Precious because what the ring did to him, but because the fact that Bilbo would use such a phrase disturbed him greatly.
As for the hobbit thing, not all hobbits would resist the ring. Only those hobbits who were inclinded to goodness. Ted Sandyman was a small, mean little hobbit, and would kill for the ring, just as Smeagol was a small mean little hobbit when he killed for the ring.
You can tell a great deal about the character of a man by observing those who hate him.
Is it just me or did that article ignore the cost of the massive number of computers they needed to acheive those special effects? I know that they spent tens of millions of dollars just on the renderwall for the Lord of the Rings movies. I realize that it cost about that much to hire extras, but there is a bit more to pay for than "just two technicians in a computer bunker."
another trend, thanks to CG, is the (almost) infinitely-large-in-every-direction room. The only two I can think of off the top of my head were in Monsters Inc (the "closet doors on dry cleaning racks" scene near the end) and SW:AOTC (the droid factory where r2 pushed 3PO and then flew, *%$#@%). Granted Monsters was a fantasy (more so than SW) but I'm seeing this a lot and getting sick of it. Wish I could think of more examples. The pod scene in the first Matrix was almost one, except that that was outside so it was kinda OK. Anyone else want to add to the list?
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
I am so tired of movies asking us to fret over who will best who in a physical fight. Oh no, the hero is danger, they bravely charge in, they take a fall, they fight back, etc, etc, etc. Sure, it pushes our primitivist buttons, but if you realize this is what is going on and step outside of it, these scenes are very boring!..
:)
Give me some reflection on attachment and loss, time as thief, things can never be the same, hope and the loss of it and finding balance once again, or _some_ higher level theme. I really don't care who can deliver the death blow in the nick of time- ESPECIALLY when it's still essentially like the old cowboys and indians- the heros seldom die or die slowly, while the bad guys die instantaneous deaths left and right.
All in all, I enjoyed the trilogy, but I'd happily trade half to three quarters of the fight scenes for more of the content from the orginal novels.
PS - It was interesting to see how they decided the make the Southerons (sp?) light skinned, side stepping the book's woefully dated african-as-devil take.
Plus, it's expensive and difficult to find ghosts and dead people who can act and stuff...
"This is you left and that's your left. This is your right and that's your right. You're gonna die!
For some reason never adequately explained, hobbits are the race least vulnerable to the call of the ring
It was explained quite fine. The Ring takes over your mind with offers of power. Hobbits are the least powerful creatures out there, and the least naturally aggressive, so the ring effects them less.
Why hobbits are relatively immune to the control of the ring yet proto-hobbits like Smeagol are especially and readily vulnerable to it to the point where they will kill their best friend over it in a heartbeat
That's not true. Smeagol/Gollum was quite resistant to the influence call. He didn't become a devastating force of evil- he just hid in a cave for 500 years. If the One Ring had been in anyone else's hands- man, dwarf, or elf- within 10 years he'd have the kings of every nation offering meak tribute to the invisible master.
(A wizard carrying it would've gone bad even faster. So would a giant eagle, which is why they didn't just fly it over)
According to the books, Smeagol, Bilbo, and Frodo withstood the Ring for similar timeframes (the Bagginses longer, because they'd been warned against it, and limited physical contact)
However, the opening to the 3rd film did make an error in over-accelerating Smeagol's descent. The book implied it took days for him to work up to an attack, not seconds. His voice changed far too fast also.
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?
Not only that, but a large percentage of major characters are played by actors over 50. The trilogy really feels grounded with such experienced actors of both film and stage, experience you don't usually come across in Hollywood films because they're obsessed with what is "hot" and "new."
"Sufferin' succotash."
Nobody "forgot" to use magic. Magic in the books was always a subtle effect spawned more from will power than fireballs.
The greatness of Gandalf in the books is that he's an agent of intervention and guidance. It helps that he happens to have one of the three rings, which pursuades people to do his will.
Actually, since you mention it, I'm surprised this is the first I've heard of this kind of criticism, because you'd expect more. Most people who have seen the movies accept Gandalf's level of power without question, despite decades of accepting that wizards are supposed to cast lightning bolts and turn their enemies into sheep. Interesting...perhaps a credit to Ian McKellen really strengthening the role without resorting to such tact.
"Sufferin' succotash."
In fact, it took six years of development on a piece of crowd-simulation software called Massive. The Post article author is just flamebaiting. Remember all those articles we read on Slashdot about how WETA had doubled their computer farm for the final film? That's a shitload of artists working on it.
"Sufferin' succotash."
BTW, way too funny you mentioned the halfling thing. Buddy of mine and I watched the RotK on Saturday, and when the end came and you had three halflings dancing on the bed I whispered "Halfling love" to Ken and we both laughed til the credits...
LFS. Have you built your system today?
There are some hints that Gandalf invoked some pretty funky magic using the Sun to overcome the Uruks at Helm's Deep. The Sun itself was the last fruit of Laurelin - one of the 2 trees which had provided the light for Valinor, the home of the Gods.
Gandalf, Saruman, Radagast and two other wizards were sent by the Gods to Middle Earth to keep Sauron in check. This was the first demonstration of Gandalf the White's new powers after being sent back by the Gods.
Encyclopedia of Arda: Sun
Those new-fangled talkies wouldn't be so popular if the sound hadn't been so good!
----- And all that the Lorax left here in this mess was a small pile of rocks, with one word...UNLESS.
...is anyone else getting tired of the "seas of CGI combatants" going to war?
I thought the flock of dinos in Jurassic Park was cool.
Then the sea of Bugs in Starship Troopers really blew my mind.
Then came the dorky robots in Star Wars I. Roger, roger.
Now were treated to vast expanses of identical models in nearly EVERY action movie.
IMO, the magic is gone.
Jackson needs more battle scenes with heart. Faramir's ride into Osgillath set to Pippin's song was far more passionate than any battle in the three movies.
https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
Um, how much worse could it possibly have been?
On the CGI point, I guess, "Pearl" might have been considerably better without the real-life shots of the American carrier group standing in for the Japanese fleet... what with the nuclear carrier along in escort and all. I'd rather have seen "fake" versions that looked like the Kaga and the Akagi, in that case.
Personally I found the colossal scale of the Two Towers battles not to capture the feeling I had about the same battles reading the books back when. Tolkien had been through a war, he understood that the people in them didn't really have the view we've got in that movie -- above it all, seeing the scale of it and all. War's dehumanizing effects on people were a big part of the books. The battles are much less central, and the way they were used in "Towers" put me off. I'd have been happy with less screaming orcs.
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
Hobbits are the least powerful creatures out there, and the least naturally aggressive, so the ring effects them less.
:)
C'mon...we all know we wanted to see Sam grab the ring and use it's power to have the best garden in all of the Shire.
As you said though - the book did over emphasis some of the aspects. I was hoping for the whole birthday present dialog myself. Then again, with the first cut of the film at 6 hours, there may have originally been a more gradual descent
Now...why they coulnd't get a giant eagle to carry Frodo to Mordor...hmmm...with the ring locked up in a box that says "do not open...throw in lava"
Stop right there... this is a FANTASY movie! Heroes in fantasy movies are allowed/supposed to be able to do things that you or I can't.
Did you also complain about Neo's super-human abilities in the Matrix series too?
There's a Mercedes gap too. I want one and can't afford one, but it's not government's job to do anything about it.
Actually, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon was written just a few years ago. It's a Wuxia or adventure/soap opera type of book. It also reflects the the wuxia style of film making, which is most recognizable by the wire style martial arts (as seen in Crouching tiger). The Matrix was was cool because it brought in Woo-ping Yuen as the martial arts director. He has a long history as a Wuxia dirctor.
I drank what? -- Socrates
--Since you mentioned Sean Bean (Boromir) I figured what the heck...
. ht m
--Am I the only one who thinks Faramir ( http://us.imdb.com/name/nm0920992/ ) looks a lot like Dave Mustaine from Megadeth?
http://www.metal-sludge.com/23QuestionsMustaine
.
== WolfriderV6 == I'm willing to admit that *I just might* be wrong... Are you??
No more shall we be the butt end of an elf's joke. No longer shall we be downtrodden and reduced to court jester! It's time we dwarves stand up for justice & equal footing in the eyes of others.
Won't somebody think of the Dwarves?!
Rise up and throw off your chains of servitude!
The elves can take away our lives and our lands but they can never have our FREEDOM!!!!!!
Despite the fact that you posted this AC, I'm really curious about what you're saying. I personally have talked to very few people who have ever partaken in the production of porn, but I certainly recognize how a lot of the people in front of the camera have lived - or live - a tumultuous life. But what puzzles me is how people only seem to focus on the female aspect of this industry. What about the guys who are brought in, expected to perform, and then flushed out? Very few guys I've met like to engage in absolutely random sex with people they do not know. Sex is just as personal for them as it is for anybody else. It always angers me when a porn movie made with unknowns is being portrayed as particularly degenerative to the women involved, not recognizing that the guys involved wash up on a another beach, and this one strangely quiet, with no media coverage, and no sympathy.
"If you read it you will find the battle to be much more gigantic than any movie could ever depict. " If you can imagine it with your mind, you can put it on film. The technology we have today is far more advanced than it was just last year.
People don't exist to serve systems, systems exist to serve people.