Wired's LOTR III Tech Breakdown 419
rjjm writes "Interesting little logistics piece in Wired about the technology WETA used for for The Return of the King." Ya know, now that the Matrix hype vanished into nowhere, I'm glad the LotR hype is gearing up. I think this one will earn it.
Will it really be good? (Score:2, Interesting)
LOTR Hype (Score:0, Interesting)
I hate to rain on your parade but if anything the indications of the Return Of The King have been disappointing. Firstly there is no sign of the Rangers of the North in the trailer even though there is a scene that obviously shows them entering the pass of the dead. Secondly it has been announced they have cut out the scenes with Sauruman, which is certainly going to make things interesting in terms of the seeing stones (I think they are called plantirs).
Re:LOTR Hype (Score:2, Interesting)
But somehow, despite the cuts and the departures from the books, the first two movies worked very well. So I'm going to keep my scepticism in check until I actually see the third.
Re: earning it's hype (Score:5, Interesting)
From the standpoint of the movies, the Saruman plot is finished, over, and done with. The seven minute scene you refer to is NOT important to the overall plot of the move: getting the ring to Mordor. You can argue all you want, but I remember hearing the same things when people complained about the removal of Tom from the Fellowship. But that hardly ruined the film.
While I agree that the extended editions are much, much better than the theatrical release, ROTK will still be a really damn good movie.
As Fran says in the TT extended edition DVD, this is one group of fants interpretation of the LotR. I never expected a blow by blow account of the retelling. Indeed, one of the scenes I missed (the one with Radagast) was never even brought up!
Put another way, if the books had never been written, and LotR had been simply a movie without a book, would that make a difference. Yes, it would. So rather than judge the movie for what they had to leave out, but rather, for what they put into the movie.
weta liquid: still not released iinto open source? (Score:3, Interesting)
it's been quite a while ago, and i still don't find it anywhere. did they lie?
Re:The Mystery of Tom Bombadil Solved! (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually, well, no. No they're not.
I suspect this is a clever troll, but I'll bite anyways. IHBT, IHL, IWHAND.
1. There's a lot of stuff you don't "hear" about in the First Age. Big deal.
2. You never see Galadriel and the Nazgul together either. So what?
3. The 'there' in Tom's comment was in reference to the pond from whence he retrieved the water lilies for Goldberry. In furtherance of this, according to the timeline, the Nazgul were not yet aware that Frodo had left the Shire at the time he met Bombadil.
4. Just because they knew who the real ring owner was intended to be does not mean they would not have been effected by it.
5. All the Nazgul could see him. Glorfindel could see him. Big deal. Does that make Glorfindel the Witch-King, or Tom Bombadil?
6. Now this is just getting silly. Any number of denizens of Arda could probably have done the same thing.
None of your points prove much of anything, except that the Nazgul and Bombadil were not in the same place at the same tim in LOTR.
A stronger case could be made, I think, that Bombadil was actually a subdued manifestation of Iluvitar (or one of the Valar). In Tolkien's world good and evil are rigidly defined (as they are in all mythologies) and I find it hard to believe that he would intend something this preposterous, when in no other case do you see a being that is both extremely evil and extremely benevolent in LOTR.
Anyhow.. IHBT.
How my friend (the long lost non-reader put it) (Score:2, Interesting)
Hell, try explaining the significance of Saruman, without revealing the seeing stone and without including the destruction of the shire, which we know is cut. Place yourself within the mindset of these blissfully ignorant few and you'll see why LOTR has such great appeal. We're just the precious few that have enjoyed the rich world so much that anything missing is a travesty.
I still want Bombadill.
Eh, I'd take Two Towers alongside those (Score:3, Interesting)
Blade Runner largely gets people cranked with its production values. The whole "Why am I here? Why is Rutger Hauer such a tragic figure?" philosophizing side of it fell flat for me even back then in the almost empty theater. We didn't exactly leave the movie talking about the original issues it brought up, and I was, what, young enough not to drive yet... For Harrison Ford it's nowhere near as complete and convincing a performance as Mosquito Coast. The lame narration it was released with, the happy ending thing... It's a cool movie to look at, I guess, but muddled by studio interference and not high on my list of movies to watch again sometime.
Minority Report was maybe the biggest mess I've seen in ten years. The entire Warner Brothers "factory fight" sequence just made me wince, again and again. (One kept hearing that WB music, even -- dump dump dump dump DUMP dump dump dump...) Max von Sydow was no surprise at all, the plotline involving how he avoided detection in the original murder made precisely zero sense (he knows where "the camera" will be for these psychics?), and so on. The movie was maybe a half-hour long, partly owing to the tooo looooong homage to Blade Runner involving the whole eye transplant thing. We left that theater saying Spielberg had overproduced his material in a big way but never answered "What if he kills people inadvertently while he's running away this way?" Pretty basic plot question, you know? It deserved awards for production design and nothing else.
And you're right, the whole "shield surfing" thing and especially the Dwarf jokes got very old in Two Towers... almost as old as the incredibly tedious Tolkienesque declarative language. ("And so.... it begins...") The "Gollum debates himself" scene produced unintentional laughter in both theaters I saw it in. But, you know, I get bashed as a movie snob -- The Third Man, Citizen Kane, the Big Sleep -- and I could bring myself to see Towers a second time, despite all the screaming orcs and so on. The first movie was better, but Towers was okay by me. Not great, but pretty good for what it was.
would have been greater than he was (Score:4, Interesting)
I once heard an interesting tweak on that, and perhaps more true than the original. "Power attracts the corruptible."
Perhaps Faramir really IS as pure as all that. Perhaps he never sought any greatness or position, only to do his best for his people. In that case, any station he has would be purely as a result of people under him pushing him up. Perhaps those of higher station yet were either born to it, or sought it, the latter implying that they are likely corruptible.
Re:Will it really be good? (Score:3, Interesting)
Exactly. I thought the Harry Potter movies were just okay --- they might have been better if they were willing to sacrifice some of fidelity to the book for cinematic energy. There's a lot of plot in a full length novel, and squeezing it all in means squeezing something else out, often particular details that give character depth. The humor of the original books got lost in the movies, in my opinion.
I think the LotR movies have done a great job of picking details to flesh out the characters. I noticed the details more the second, etc. time I watched them, kind of like the books.
Re:As a data center manager (here comes the math). (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually, essentially all of it is turned into heat in the room (except for the microscopic amount of power that gets sent out of the room as Ethernet pulses). Yep, technically 1 is "at least 1/3", but the second law of thermodynamics is too oft forgotten.
When I moved into my dorm room at Stanford, nearly 15 years ago, I was shocked to discover that the university imposed a surcharge per quarter for the power used by certain appliances -- e.g. if you brought a mini-fridge or a microwave, you were were supposed to pay an extra $10/month or something to account for the power you used. The catch? The dorms were heated with ELECTRICAL HEATERS. Hence it was practically impossible to waste electricity in the cool half of the year -- using your fridge or microwave would just reduce the duty cycle of the elctric heater...
Re: earning it's hype (Score:1, Interesting)
It's a great website in general for fans of LOTR and Ian McKellen!
Re: earning it's hype (Score:4, Interesting)
If you watch the extended edition of Two Towers, it outlines the tragedy of both Boromir and Faramir very poignantly -- Denethor puts all his faith in Boromir, and shuns Faramir as a failure and a weakling. Faramir desperately wants to "prove his quality" to his father, but doesn't have the opportunity.
Then Boromir goes off and fails, and dies -- and no doubt we will see Denethor saying his lines "why couldn't it have been Faramir?" somewhere in Return of the King.
So now Faramir finds the Ring coming into his possession, and finally has a chance to finish what his brother has started, redeem himself in the eyes of his father, and perhaps save all Gondor and Middle-Earth while he's at it (so he thinks anyway).
No slight intended to the great Professor Tolkien, but I found this much more interesting as a plot than goody-two-shoes Faramir who sits the hobbits down, has a nice chat, and then lets them go. It paints both Boromir and Faramir as wonderfully tragic characters, where in the books I found Boromir a tad unsympathetic and Faramir a trifle dull.
Re:Will it really be good? (Score:3, Interesting)
What the Harry Potter books have going for them is "profluence" ( the term John Gardner used to describe the quality of book that makes you unable to put it down, you just have to keep reading to find what happens next). A good plot can create profluence, but I think there's much more to it than that, good storytelling, empathetic characters, and above all, the ability to invoke a "vivid, continuous dream" in the reader's mind.
I think the HP books have good character development too, especially if you consider the whole series. Oddly, Harry is the flattest character in some ways.