I didn’t mean no CG and all practical, I meant ‘showing restraint’ - they’re absolutely still using a ton of CG in Force Awakens. :)
But they’re going on location, building actual sets, using puppetry, and enhancing with CG rather than doing everything digitally. And they’ve been trumpeting that increase in practical in the marketing, much like Fury Road did.
They did a wonderful job grounding all of their effects. Anything that requires motion appears very real.
It gives one hope.
I haven’t seen the third film yet either, and I’m not sure I ever will.
I wouldn’t feel compelled.
That’s because it’s mostly “real”, i.e someone being thrown off an exploding car in a shot is usually a stuntman being thrown off an exploding car. They’ve used cg to erase the safety rigs, composited it into a shot with some other action, and more like as not replaced the background, but the actual motion is genuine, which is why it looks so good.
Daagar
2006
Watched the whole 3 hour edited edition. Very well done, considering he had to scrap 5.5 hours worth of film to get it down to that length. It is very heavy on the first movie, then the following two are a whirlwind and the discontinuities really start to show. Not much you can really do about this, considering he was taking out huge swaths of plot lines. I’m not entirely sure someone could watch just this version and be satisfied, or even claim to know what just happened. But for anyone that really enjoys Martin Freeman as Bilbo but didn’t want to sit through all the other stuff again, this is how you do it. I think some things may have been more clear if he allowed himself to go to 3.5-4 hours.
The only omission I was disappointed about, apparently being part dwarf myself, was the opening of the first movie where they show Ironforge^H^H^H^H^H Erebor in all its glory before the destruction. I’m a sucker for that stuff.
Wait, so the scene in Fury Road with the sandstorm and tornadoes and exploding car and bodies flying around was CG? Wow. :p
I think Force Awakens will still have lot of CG, but will be a lot of restraint too. Well, compared to the SW prequels, anything is restraint. The Hobbit is probably a step below that, but…
Still the third movie is just not great. Worse, the battle sequences were incredibly disappointing and barely made sense. And the dwarf leader dude was all CG. What the heck was that for???
— Alan
Gedd
2010
Wow, R rating on this? I held off buying the theatrical versions because of the three sets of LotR DVDs/Blu-Rays I’ve got on the shelf, but now I’ve got to wait and see what the R rating is about. I’m not sure how logical that decision (releasing an R-rated Director’s Cut) is when this is so clearly targeted to kids.
Oh, I guess this is why we didn’t see Alfrid die in the theatrical release.
https://youtu.be/HfB4OK33LkY
Fucking terrible.
rowe33
2012
I’m just glad this trilogy came out after the LotR or who knows how terrible that would have been.
Cormac
2014
wow… new lows reveal themselves.
Never have I been so aware of “Be careful what you wish for.”
I thought I really wanted to see Alfrid die in BoFA. I was wrong.
So wrong.
JD
2016
Such a shame this didn’t make it into the theatrical release. When the credits were rolling, we were looking at each other and went: “You know what would have made all this better? More Alfrid and more bloody Looney Tunes action!”
And it really hammers home how poorly executed everything is. The CGI set looks utterly fake and is missing that sense of wonder that the combination of real sets, model sets, and CGI sets in the LotR movies brought to the table. The CGI Gandalf that dodges the mace strikes is not animated well enough and I immediately felt that something’s off, only adding to the artificiality of the scene. And I guess the last days prior the delivery deadline went like this: “Anybody got time to do a proper skybox? … Anyone? Nope. Ah well, let’s just make this stuff white.”
It’s obviously fair to complain about how stupid the scene is, but I think complaints about effects are misplaced for a deleted/excluded scene. Those obviously don’t get the same attention from the FX teams as the release scenes.
The scenes in the movie really aren’t much better.
JD
2019
Based on the video title this was included in the Extended Edition, wasn’t it? WETA Digital was still working and polishing the EE material after the theatrical release, so it’s not like there’s rough material in there.
Of course, if it wasn’t actually in the Extended Edition cut and only in the section with deleted scenes on the EE discs, then yeah, it naturally looks rougher. But then again, most deleted scenes usually still have green screen material in them.
Also, as Telefrog said, the theatrical versions of the Hobbit movies contained plenty of poor CGI. The dwarves riding up the mountain and Legolas’s Super Mario moment being the most obvious bits, but a number of other scenes lacked polish for reasons I mentioned in a previous post a while ago.
wut the goddamn
These movies should be cited forever as examples of directors needing less creative control to avoid their indulgences after success. Star Wars, Matrix, LotR - 2 good movies maximum before things devolved significantly, and were unrecognizable after 3.
What the heck did I just watch?
Although I’m not ashamed to admit that I really enjoyed the last Hobbit movie. After two distended full-plus-length fan-service wankfests in which nothing happened, it sure was nice to get a couple of hours of nothing but crazy fights and sprawling battle vistas and mean-looking badass orcs issuing commands and dwarfs showing up to save the day and trolls and, uh, whatever else was in there. I think there were some giant eagles?
-Tom
newbrof
2022
Why is Gandalf using a lightbulb…? Aren’t they banned in the EU for inefficiency?
