Message in a Battle 460
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.
Quality of RotK (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Quality of RotK (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah, the orc 300th in from the left of the screen did an awesome job - definitely a star of the future.
Re:Quality of RotK (Score:5, Funny)
Star? Cobblers. He left his wristwatch on, which is clearly visible for 0.5 of a second using the zoom feature of my Supa DVD player. And he doesn't even exist!
Re:Quality of RotK (Score:2, Funny)
but that's what i call realism... they even rendered wristwatches for the computer generated orcs. artificial bloopers, a concept of the future indeed!
that's worth a patent
Re:Quality of RotK (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Quality of RotK (Score:3, Insightful)
Hmm.. Dunno about that, Monsters Inc. has artificial bloopers at the end, and that movie was 100% CG.
Re:Quality of RotK (Score:5, Insightful)
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? (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
Normally... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Normally... (Score:2, Informative)
I think something was missing but it has nothing to do with the CGI.
I have NOT read the book and I do not plan to.
That's why it was difficult for me to clearly understand why some characters appeared all of a sudden.
They looked like patches applied to fulfill some scenario hole.
Of course, I can imagine some angry moderator will kick my butt because I dare criticiz
Your loss (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Your loss (Score:3, Insightful)
While this may be true, I have never quite understood why so many people were up in arms over its exclusion. Tom Bombadil was a character of no consequence - a page-filling distraction. When you consider him within the entire scope of the epic, he really does not serve any true purpose.
Of course, if I am mistaken about this and overlooked the significance of his character, I hope that
Re:Your loss (Score:4, Interesting)
Except that he was older than any other resident of Middle-Earth, and was the only character the One Ring (or any of its effects) held no power over. I think he serves as an important contrast to the immortality of the elves and the temporality of the humans involved in the last struggle of the Third Age.
Re:Your loss (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Your loss (Score:3, Funny)
So brave you forgot to log in?
LOTR (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:LOTR (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:LOTR (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:LOTR (Score:3, Insightful)
Btw, the Eowyn/Faramir subplot was not re
Re:LOTR (Score:2)
Matrix (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Matrix (Score:2, Insightful)
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*
Re:Matrix (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Matrix (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Matrix (Score:2)
That's fair, I guess, since the video game (Enter the Matrix) "Played" like a movie.
Re:Matrix (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Matrix (Score:2, Informative)
I'd also question your second statement - I found the CG battle scenes in Revolutions to be decidedly hit-and-miss, and on other levels they weren't really doing a huge amount over and above what they won that first Oscar for. I'd be nominating X2 (for the stunning work on Nightcrawler), Return Of The King (Gollum is as m
You know... things just don't amaze me. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:You know... things just don't amaze me. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:You know... things just don't amaze me. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:You know... things just don't amaze me. (Score:5, Insightful)
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!
Re:You know... things just don't amaze me. (Score:3, Insightful)
Perhaps you should stop watching crappy movies that are built around FX and CGI then?
Seriously. Go to IMDB [imdb.com] 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 e
Re:You know... things just don't amaze me. (Score:5, Informative)
Dobby the House Elf in Harry Potter was ground-breaking, but Gollum seems to be a whole generation above that.
Re:You know... things just don't amaze me. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.)
Re:You know... things just don't amaze me. (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:You know... things just don't amaze me. (Score:4, Informative)
One of the frequent dangers of car accidents is that people will pull an accident victim from their car, assuming it will blow up (as they've seen it a billion times in the movies). Properly aerating and dispersing gasoline such that it is explosive is pretty rare in car accidents, though, and the much greater danger is that a person with spine injuries will be further injured by...people pulling them out of the car.
Re:You know... things just don't amaze me. (Score:3, Interesting)
I also thought the graphics in Final Fantasy were interesting. But they went from hot to cold. Some scenes were fluid. Some were... robotic.
All in all, I thought Shrek had more "real" looking characters than FF. In fact, I remember a comment from the animators saying they had to conciously work to make sure their characters didn't look too real - this being a fairy tale an
Re:You know... things just don't amaze me. (Score:3, Interesting)
According to what I remember from the "making-of" snippets, it was Princess Fiona [celebritywonder.com] who caused them the most trouble with that issue - their first version was apparently too realistic [digitalmediafx.com] for believable placement and interaction within the film's world. They couldn't have a
The battles would have been a lot better (Score:5, Interesting)
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???!
Re:The battles would have been a lot better (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:The battles would have been a lot better (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:The battles would have been a lot better (Score:3, Insightful)
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, bu
Dwarf humor in The Hobbit (Score:4, Insightful)
The reason (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:The battles would have been a lot better (Score:2)
Re:The battles would have been a lot better (Score:3, Funny)
Nah, half the
CGI, huh? (Score:5, Insightful)
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. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:It's the *story* that makes it a good film. (Score:2, Interesting)
CGI battling hords are cool (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Be entertained you whiney twits (Score:2, Insightful)
Many people I've talked to knew full well of the past work of Peter Jackson and although they realised in advance that humorous additions would happen they only seem able to harp on about how much of the film didn't flow correctly, or how changes and additions that Peter Jackson made were unneeded and ruined the overall feel of the film.
The film is good, all films have their good and bad points, accepting that the film was good (great) won't detract from your precious novels, they still exist un
Re:Be entertained you whiney twits (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Be entertained you whiney twits (Score:3, Insightful)
Nah... that would be anybody who can't handle the fact that different people have differing opinions.
CG (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:CG (Score:2)
Yes, they had a very large group of extras and use rather primitive CGI to "clone" those extras into an even bigger group. While I just called the CGI primitive, it's important to note that is only compared to current standards. When the SG movie came out, most the effects were pretty spectacular, save a few moments of cheesiness.
Also, the SG movie was the first film to have an off
Make love, not war! (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Re:Make love, not war! (Score:2, Funny)
A!
Is Michael allowed to smoke pot on the job? (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Re:Is Michael allowed to smoke pot on the job? (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
To the writer of the article.... (Score:5, Interesting)
With that, I'll say his opinion is lame.
Thats my thought..er,
cgi porn (Score:5, Interesting)
Down this path are all sorts of questions...
Re:cgi porn (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Re:cgi porn (Score:5, Insightful)
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
Re:cgi porn (Score:3, Insightful)
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'?
Re:cgi porn (Score:3, Insightful)
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 [livejournal.com]. (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
My personal complaint (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:My personal complaint (Score:2)
at Minas Tirith it's similar with the cavalry except there it's orcs not uruk hai, and orcs are smaller aren't they? you can see on the orcs' faces that even though they have spears the sight of all the cavalry scares the shit out of them - I love that; it's the first time humans are considered strong.
Re:My personal complaint (Score:5, Interesting)
Charging into Oliphaunts was not the best idea, but hey, it was the first time most of them had EVER seen oliphaunts! Beginner's mistake eh... :)
Re:My personal complaint (Score:2, Funny)
"Oh shit!"
or
"Charge!"
Re:My personal complaint (Score:2)
Re:My personal complaint (Score:5, Interesting)
You are correct that if they break the line cavalry are very good at breaking ranks. However, you miss two things. One, breaking ranks doesn't mean the cavalry have really caused much in the way of casualties to the infantry.
One Waterloo cavalryman reported, "Many threw themselves on the ground until we had gone over, and then rose and fired." Keegan points out, "To lie down was usually enough to put one beyond a swordsman's reach, and those who shammed were already safely behind the cavalry, whose attention was focused on the enemy lines to which their impetus was carrying them." Thus cavalry can easily break lines but those lines can be readily reformed by good commanders. There is no indication that the orcs armies have poor commanders, poor organization, or poor morale.
More importantly, however, Keegan points out that cavalry are in actuality completely ineffective against trained infantry. "And indeed if the story of Waterloo has a leitmotiv it is that of cavalry charging square and being repulsed...The feat of breaking a square was tried by the French cavalry time and again at Waterloo -- there were perhaps twelve main assaults during the great afternoon cavalry effort -- and always with a complete lack of success."
Cavalry break the line of infantry not because of anything particularly irresistible about cavalry. They break the line because the infantry fear the horses riding down on them and give up the line voluntarily.
Keegan's examination of cavalry versus infantry at the battle of Agincourt, which might seem more germane to Tolkiens technological levels, finds essentially the same thing. The French cavalry charge of the British archer lines failed completely. "The 'shock' which cavalry seek to inflict is really moral, not physical in character...The charge, momentarily terrifying for the English...had stopped only a few feet distant, had been a disaster for the enemy."
I don't see any reason why Gandalf's cavalry charge would have worked out as anything but a similar disaster.
Re:My personal complaint (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:My personal complaint (Score:3, Interesting)
No, that's completely stupid. If the cavalry pull up short to play around like that, they've given up their speed advantage, and will die. Roman-style techniques work when you have Roman-style phalanxes- you can't do that from a horse: if you inch up to a foe expecting him to jab you in the shield, your horse will be dead long before he turns attention to the rider.
Th
Re:My personal complaint (Score:2)
Oh yes, the strategy in all the movies is dire. But better by far than Gandalfs flashbang has to be the bit in RotK where Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli charge the enemy and the Orcs are all 'what the Hell - chop 'em to pieces,' and then suddenly it's all like the Boys are Back.
Yeah man! I want a ghost army !!!
Re:My personal complaint (Score:2, Insightful)
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...
Bullshite! (Score:4, Interesting)
Non-battle CG (Score:2, Insightful)
Those would probably have been harder to do than the battles, so I can't really blame them for not including those
LoTR and battles (Score:5, Insightful)
"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.
Re:LoTR and battles (Score:2)
Re:LoTR and battles (Score:2)
My point is simply that imagination is always more powerful than explicit imagery, and CGI effects have to leave that space open, or they balanize the story into becoming a sophisticated cartoon.
Anyone read McSweeney's? (Score:3, Funny)
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 [mcsweeneys.net]
Part Two [mcsweeneys.net]
A sample:
A bit more:
Credit to Casting (Score:5, Interesting)
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...
Re:Credit to Casting (Score:3, Interesting)
Why not believable? Do you believe that somehow, if you are Japanese and a samurai that you are invincible and superior to every other person in the world? Why? Just because you train in an art does not make you immediately "better" in the areas of combat. In fact, it might be s
Are you sure you saw CG? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Two Towers: The Low Budget Cut (Score:5, Funny)
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.
5 year olds in the cinema (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Grumpy old guy says... (Score:3, Funny)
The problem I have with this article (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:The problem I have with this article (Score:3, Interesting)
From FotR:
From Tony Blair [nytimes.com]:
Did michael even read the article (Score:3, Interesting)
Could the article have been more misleading?
CGI is Theft (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Trivialization of CGI artistry (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
The World's Worst LOTR Film Review (Score:5, Interesting)
Samurai banners (Score:3, Informative)
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.
my biggest beef with the RotK battles (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:Obligatory Simpsons (Score:5, Funny)
Re:irony & ignorance (Score:4, Funny)
Re:I can't watch them! (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Message in a Review (Score:3, Informative)