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Comment by Cthulhu_

7 days ago

Whether or not you enjoy the stories, the action scenes and visuals in the sequels were groundbreaking use of CGI in action films. Around the same time the LotR trilogy came out which did something similar.

I rewatched the first one the other day and for the most part the visuals and CGI have held up over time, barely any "oh man this is bad CGI lmao" moments. Which somehow got worse with later films, e.g. the Hobbit having a lot of "this is obviously cgi lmao what is this".

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Cthulhu_

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iainmerrick  7 days ago

I think the main trick is that they set out to make the best and most impressive movie(s) they could with every tool available -- practical effects, old-school camera angle tricks to make the hobbits look small, hordes of extras and well-crafted props, as well as groundbreaking CGI.

Same with Jurassic Park, come to think about it -- there's famously more animatronic dinosaurs in that movie than CGI.

As opposed to relying on one shiny new tool to take care of everything. I think with The Hobbit they got over-enamoured with the notion that you can do anything with CGI.

More recently, Andor is a good example with its mix of CGI and massive sets; The Mandalorian is a bad example with its over-reliance on the "Volume" LED stage.

  • thaumasiotes  7 days ago

    > As opposed to relying on one shiny new tool to take care of everything. I think with The Hobbit they got over-enamoured with the notion that you can do anything with CGI.

    But the visuals are The Hobbit's main selling point. People hate it because of the writing.

    • iainmerrick  7 days ago

      I was responding to the parent comment, that the CGI somehow got worse with later films, e.g. the Hobbit having a lot of "this is obviously cgi lmao what is this"

      I agree with that, The Hobbit looked pretty bad. You're right that part of it was the bad writing, but I think it's a vicious circle -- if you're convinced that CGI can make twenty minutes of elf-vs-goblin parkour look cool, you'll write that into the script.

      If instead you started from the viewpoint of, well, we made a successful movie trilogy out of a famous book trilogy; here's another famous and beloved book by the same author, who even went back and revised it to make it fit with the trilogy -- why don't we just use all the tools at our disposal to put that book on the big screen? Maybe that could have resulted in one really good movie.

      2 replies →

    • tuna74  7 days ago

      The parts of the Hobbit movies that have actual sets, locations and people in costume looks really good. The problem is that the CGI is just too much in most places.

marcosdumay  7 days ago

> the action scenes and visuals in the sequels were groundbreaking use of CGI in action films

Well, the innovative scenes vary from the incredibly good highway chase to the boring and ridiculous fight between Neo and Agent Smith. Those movies were groundbreaking in "bad uses of CGI" too.

doubleg72  7 days ago

I didn’t think lotr used cgi

  • bigDinosaur  7 days ago

    It does, most notably perhaps for things like the Ents and large parts of the battle in RoTK (e.g. Army of the Dead, Oliphaunts). It just did so much practically that it's one of those films where it might be a bit difficult to delineate if you aren't looking closely, similar to films like Fury Road.

  • trq01758  7 days ago

    Andy Serkis was great, but not as good at shape-shifting. For LOTR renderfarm WETA bought a bunch of SGI 1200 dual core Pentium III 700MHz servers with 1GB RAM, 9 GB SCSI disks all running RedHat Linux. I've read at some point they had 192 SGI 1100 and 1200 servers working.

  • thorin  7 days ago

    It didn't use anywhere near as much as the hobbit, but lots of things are enhanced. I have a similar problem with Avengers/Marvel which just doesn't look great to me. Avatar did look very good though. The main problem I have with CGI is if the story isn't there, which for me is definitely the case with most Avengers movies which are just a mess.

  • ekaryotic  7 days ago

    the actor that played gandalf ian mckellen? had a minor breakdown on set after he was made to stand on a greenscreen for multiple days.