Singing Potatoes
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Friday, 3 January 2003
Thoughts upon The Two Towers

Details I liked:

  • Gollum. Damn, the color/specularity/bump maps on his skin must have been absolutely humongous. The lip-synch was perfect. He interacted beautifully with the environment. The only thing that could have been improved was the eyeballs; it was glaringly obvious they used the same exact image map for both eyes, without even rotating them to make them appear non-identical.
  • Liv Tyler is an elf. Specifically, a changeling. It's inconceivable that someone who looks like a Gelfling could produce offspring like this.
  • The tower models themselves gave me hope that moviemaking won't abandon physical miniatures for all-CG models anytime soon. That was some great detail work.

Details I didn't like:

  • Gimli's height kept changing. Sometimes the top of his head came up to Aragorn's shoulder, other times it was down at waist level.
  • I could have sworn that Ents were supposed to be as tall as the other trees in the forest.
  • That was the most tepid "love triangle" I've ever seen.
  • I don't care how realistic they were, the battle scenes where you couldn't tell what was going on were headache-inducing.
Posted by godfrey (link)
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Comments
I'm so glad Gollum's loincloth stayed put!

He was a great example of Jung's concept of the "Shadow self", btw.
Posted by Karen on 4 Jan 2003 09:16
My 2 cents:

* Gimli's height - totally agree, it was almost as annoying as the fact that they turned him into comic relief. This is one bad-ass character, and they had to keep saving him, and the pansy elf was out-killing him. Arhgh!

* That was the most tepid "love triangle" I've ever seen. - I don't know, I think the Sam-Frodo-Smeegle triangle was rife full of jealousy and angst!

I heard a quote from Jackson that his new 'Massive' CGI package, which will program each and every character to act on it's own, not just vibrate in the backgroud - "It will make the opening scene in Gladiator look like a soap-opera slap fight."

Them's big words, let's hope they're accurate.
Posted by Lunchbox on 6 Jan 2003 07:29
Actually, I think that was a love quadrangle, if you factor in the Dissociative Identity Disorder — Sméagol obviously had a crush on Frodo, but I think Gollum had the hots for Samwise.

Posted by Godfrey on 6 Jan 2003 08:31
Gollum was the best thing in the movie. I'll spare you my rants about how they diddled with the plot (and the "dwarf-tossing" remark)....sadly, I thought the Ents were big, like, REALLY big, and bitched about it until I looked it up in the book (which I haven't reread for years) and discovered they were....fourteen feet tall. (Then I bitched about how the Ents in the movie were too big. No pleasing some people.) I think it was too many childhood trips to Muir Park that convinced me Treebeard was something like a big friendly sequoia.
Posted by Moira on 23 Jan 2003 13:47
Fourteen feet? Well, that's just... disappointing.

Posted by Godfrey on 23 Jan 2003 13:53
Yeah, it seemed most un-Entish. I truly imagined the Ents as redwoods.
Posted by Moira on 24 Jan 2003 16:01
One friend of mine forced upon me some truly rancid fanfic, so when Legolas gives the necklace back to Aragorn and Eowyn sees this parts of my brain are going: "Oh so THAT's who gave you the necklace! Oh....oh I see...."
Posted by Moira on 24 Jan 2003 16:02
Hullow guys! I don't know you, but I had to tell everybody that Gollum's the best character I've ever seen! I love him so much, 'cause he's sooo cute (according to me), and his life is just... too sad. I cry every time I read the books (which I read quite often). Poor, poor old thing... Ok, I'm sorry, but I had to say it. Thanks for losing your time with me!
Posted by Yavanna on 12 Jan 2004 10:55