I was one of the few souls that did not like the first installment of LOTR. However, because of family pressure I have tickets to see #2 this afternoon.
I think JRR spent a little to much time in the local opium parlor. Just seeing the technology used in creating the film is a real treat though...
Great review. You're a good writer. Thanks.
Thank you so much for this wonderful review. I cannot wait to see this film. I am leaving work at 1:00 today so I can go see it. Am I bad or what? I, too, have been anticipating this movie for an entire year. I read the books this year (out loud to my son) and thoroughly enjoyed them. Needless to say, we have been unable to find another set of books that remotely compares to LOTR. We may have to read it again!
I was in Blockbuster the other day and they are selling used DVDs of LOTR for $16!
Wormtongue looks like a prototypical politician who claims to be doing good but is really loyal to the dark lord and out for himself. How many US generals, lawyers, congressmen etc... have accepted Saudi payments and in exchange have made our country more vulnerable to attack. When I see Wormtongue I think immediately of Daschel or any number of the figures paraded on the evening news.
The good king Theoden could not see Wormtongue's true agenda. As in real life many today also cannot see the true agenda and harm that the left intends. As in Venezuela, some people may rise up only when the orcs are at the gates at which point one wonders will the defenses hold?
The scene were Saurumon and Wormtongue are in teh tower in front of the massed orc army. Those guys look like Hitler and Goebbbels at the Rally at Nuremberg. That surely was the model for that scene.
Regarding your comments on the thousands of orcs, I thought you might find this story over at Wired.Com interesting:
http://www.wired.com/news/digiwood/0,1412,56778,00.html
Here's the text:
Digital Actors in Rings Can Think
WELLINGTON, New Zealand -- In a sparse, sunlit loft, programmer Stephen Regelous quietly works alone every day to the hum of his laptop. But what he's really doing is leading the masses.
Regelous created Massive, the special-effects program behind the colossal battles in The Lord of the Ringsfilm trilogy. Using Massive, the Oscar-winning Weta Digital team pulled off anticipated scenes for the latest installment, The Two Towers-- such as the battle at Helm's Deep -- by digitally generating smart crowds to supplement the live action.
The computer-generated characters, called agents, have minds of their own.
"Every agent has its own choices and a complete brain," Regelous said. "The most important thing about making realistic crowds is making realistic individuals."
To bring J.R.R. Tolkien's books to life, gathering 70,000 or so tall, broad-shouldered extras, dressing them in elaborate armor and choreographing them slaughtering each other was out of the question. And that was just one scene from the prologue to The Fellowship of the Ring.
So in 1996, director Peter Jackson asked Regelous, who had worked on Jackson's film The Frighteners,to come up with a program that could handle the task.
In Massive, agents' brains -- which look like intricate flow charts -- define how they see and hear, how fast they run and how slowly they die. For the films, stunt actors' movements were recorded in the studio to enable the agents to wield weapons realistically, duck to avoid a sword, charge an enemy and fall off tower walls flailing.
Like real people, agents' body types, clothing and the weather influence their capabilities. Agents aren't robots, though. Each makes subtle responses to its surroundings with fuzzy logic rather than yes-no, on-off decisions. And every agent has thousands of brain nodes, such as their combat node, which has rules for their level of aggression.
When an animator places agents into a simulation, they're released to do what they will. It's not crowd control but anarchy. That's because each agent makes decisions from its point of view. Still, when properly genetically engineered, the right character will always win the fight.
"It's possible to rig fights, but it hasn't been done," Regelous said. "In the first test fight we had 1,000 silver guys and 1,000 golden guys. We set off the simulation, and in the distance you could see several guys running for the hills."
For inspiration, Regelous didn't watch war movies as you might expect. Instead he experimented with artificial intelligence by growing digital plants, and studied how people avoided each other on crowded streets.
Massive is not just for making war. It was also used to generate doubles of the film's stars and to create flocks of birds.
"I wanted to take the processes of nature and apply them to generate computer imagery," Regelous said.
As a result, when the dark wizard Saruman leads his Uruk-hai warriors to Helm's Deep to crush the human alliance in The Two Towers,the army isn't made up of the same character copied and pasted 50,000 times, marching symmetrically like a chain of paper dolls.
"Every soldier is drawing from their own repertoire of military moves and determining how they will fight the fight," explained Richard Taylor, director of Weta Workshop, on New Line Cinema's site. "Some of the scenes that we'll see in Helm's Deep will defy belief."
Regelous plans to sell Massive for $40,000 per single floating license. Even if he doesn't win over the market, some say he's made great advances. Seth Lippman, a 3-D sequence lead for the first two Ringsfilms, said Massive surpasses techniques used for other Oscar-winning films he's worked on.
"In What Dreams May Come,the crowd characters were like 2-D billboards in space -- filler. They couldn't become main parts of the action," Lippman said. "The illusion created by using the 2-D billboards would be exposed when employing the radical 3-D moves Peter Jackson is famous for. With the Massive approach, he could fly cameras right through the middle of the battle."
For his part, Regelous is satisfied that Massive's agents are covert enough to win over fans of the classic trilogy.
"I can't tell what's Massive and what's not anymore."
Get the extended version. It comes with a free ticket to see "The Two Towers" (expires 12/31/02).
If I had 40K to blow I'd buy it just to make battles. Could be a lot of fun. Probably has potential use for people studying historic battle too. But it would be a lot of fun.
If you buy it, buy the extended version. It's not like most 'director's cuts' which tend to be: "The theatrical version stunk so I'll throw in some more scenes to dupe people into trying it on tape/DVD." This extended version fills out some of the parts that were necessarily clipped in the theaters due to the scope and length of the story.
Here's my review of The Two Towers, caught a midnight showing. Could you ping the Ring Ping list for me?
