Xenite.Org News

Some notes on the Comicon footage - Lord of the Rings news - J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings

July 25, 2000 at 02:59:31

We reviewed the comments at both Ain't It Cool News and Tolkien Online and the Tolkien Online report seems to be the better written one.

The full report is available here. Thanks, Ted.

A couple of notes. Ted has the feeling that the scene with Sam and his daughter may come early in the movie. "Well, I'm back" is probably the most famous ending line of any book. It seems to us that Peter Jackson intends to keep the ending as close to the book as possible, but that is just our gut feeling

Also, people have seen the armies of Orcs crawling like ants in the Internet trailer and the Showest (and now Comicon) footage. But no real perspective has been given for just how many individual figures are being programmed.

In "Star Wars: Episode I, The Phantom Menace", according to the Director's Cut video, there were 4,000 Droids facing off with 4,000 Gungans in the movie's climactic battle. When Peter Jackson's people first began talking about their Massive software, they said they could put up to 200,000 individuals into a battle scene. So Massive promises to show up to 25 times more CGI characters than any movie so far has attempted to portray.

Although no battles in the War of the Ring included so many soldiers (the largest battle was probably the one fought in front of the Morannon), if the prologue (or other parts of the movies) depicts the War of the Last Alliance, then Massive will be able to portray the vanguard of the Host of Gil-galad and Elendil, and maybe a little more, with some accuracy (give or take a few tens of thousands).

Filming has just resumed on the "Lord of the Rings" movies this week after a brief winter hiatus.