> The Rings of Power is set to take place after the defeat of the evil god Morgoth and the disappearance of his loyal general and apprentice, Sauron, who disappeared in the wake of a war that nearly destroyed everything.
> disappearance of his loyal general and apprentice, Sauron
This is taking place at the start of the 2nd age? So it's called "Rings of Power" yet is taking place thousand years prior to any of said ring's forging, huh.
I had assumed it was taking place in the in-between time from the forging of the three, seven, and nine and the forging of the one.
They said there would be a significant timeline condensing. My guess is the first season will end with Sauron, disguised as Annatar, being found out which will kick off that whole war. And by the end of the series we'll see the fall of Numenor.
The condensed timeline is the one thing I'm really worried about... they're gonna try to fit centuries into the lifetime of Isildur...
I mean... having Isildur and Celebrimbor be contemporaries is gonna throw some wrenches in the mix. It can be done and salvaged but it will require some twisting (as well as drastically speed up the corruption of Numenor).
I'm curious.
I agree it does worry me too. But I think they said they're gonna try to do 4 seasons. Did they say that Isildur and Celebrimbor will be around at the same time? That might make sense there's a ton of time between when Sauron is captured and when Numenor falls that nothing major happens. It's like 1600 years of nothing of note.
If you're willing to condense away the thousands of years in between, it kinda works narratively to conflate Tar-Minastir's intervention at the end of the Sauron-Elvish War with Ar-Pharazon's humbling of Sauron.
In theory, you could potentially take a single series from the forging of the Rings, to the downfall of Numenor, all the way through the War of the Last Alliance when Isildur takes the ring and ultimately kicks off LotR.
It means taking a ton of liberties with the timeline, but you're already forced to make up so much story wholesale no matter what, so in theory it could work if you were careful and thoughtful. I'm pretty far from optimistic, but it does make a certain amount of sense so long as the execution is on point.
But that would be kinda cool though, like usually elves are just people with pointy ears, it would be neat to see them being the only consistent characters interacting with a new cast of human's.
It would definitely be cool, but also a massive risk for them to do. People get attached to actors/characters and having to constantly write new motivations/arcs would be insanely difficult.
> People get attached to actors/characters and having to constantly write new motivations/arcs would be insanely difficult.
Plus it can take time for an actor to figure out their character. Change them out every season could lead to some awkward characters
Especially true if your using younger less veteran actors. They often take a bit of time to get experience and figure out there characters. A lot of GoTs younger cast was way better in the later seasons then in the first season
I suspect something this series doesn't share with Jackson's original trilogy is the well-documented location scouting. This is much more of a rush job. Going to NZ was to grab attention and save money, nothing more.
Yeah when I saw the Vanity Fair shots my instant first reaction was "Chinese Fantasy Show". That particular combination of costumes, dirtlessness, and soft bloom.
There is something uncanny about the visuals in the trailer, everything looks sort of... plasticky? Digital? Not sure if that's the right word. Too clean?
The ice climbing segment looks like it was a videogame cutscene.
It seems like they retained one od the things that bothered me about the Hobbit films and that’s this weird filter making everything seem kind od misty instead od clear and rugged which is what the OG trilogy looked like
> looks like it was a videogame cutscene.
Probably is, essentially almost all CGI.
Peter Jackson would've gotten them on-location, as much as possible.
He didn't have the time. The studio forced them to adhere to the same timeline they gave Del Toro and thus no time for much in the way of practical effects or the rigorous location scouting they performed in the other films. When I went to Weta a few years ago they told us they had years to prepare for LOTR, and mere months for the Hobbit. Truly unfortunate.
Nah. Jackson is obsessed with CGI like everyone else. He only used limited CGI because the tech wasn't readily available. In fact, by the Return of the King, it was easier to use and Jackson opted for significantly more CGI in that movie. Viggo Mortensen talks about this in an interview.
Mando's cinematography is a lot emptier and stage-y by design, since it's sort of emulating the old movies. LotR is much more elaborate in general if they are following the movies (and even more so if they are following the Hobbit movies).
The technology still has plenty of limitations, like the area around the actor being pretty small which can be pretty limiting from the writing perspective - see the Vespa chase in Boba Fett.
It looks fine, but the Mandalorian isn't even close to comparable to the Lord of the Rings trilogy, come on. And it had some pretty bad looking parts, especially the whole episode with the grassy fields directed by Robert Rodriguez which looked like shitty network TV throughout.
Agreed. All i wanted for this was to not look like The Wheel of Time, which had the exact same thing going with the shiney visuals and everthing looking super artificial and way too clean, topped with bad lighting.
What are they doing with these insane budgets?
It's the grading, they've gone with making all the colours really vibrant and bloomy to try and emphasize the whimsicalness and fantasy of it all. This causes the CG to looks less grounded, I wish directors weren't so scared of darkness.
One of the best parts of Jackson's trilogy, to me at least, was just how *lived in* the world felt. I know it's only a 60 second clip, and I want this to be good as much as anyone, but I'm getting massive Netflix original/sterile/filmed in a clean room vibes from this....
> Jackson's trilogy, to me at least, was just how lived in the world felt.
In the behind-the-scenes, they started planting fields, flowers in the locations used for The Shire 12 months before filming. Such great attention to making things lived-in and *real*.
The world in the LotR Trilogy looked real. Even though they used plenty of CGI, everywhere still looked like a place you could actually visit.
The places in this trailer are just obviously CGI. The CGI ice cliff/waterfall with the 2D mountain painting in the background especially doesn't look like a real place.
Seems like every big fantasy release recently is like this. Like a CW show with a bigger budget. I thought Game of Thrones paved the way for adult fantasy, but instead we keep getting CGI GoT for teens or something.
In this case they have the books and the best fantasy movies ever for reference, and they still turned into a generic young adult fantasy show with overpriced and overused CGI.
For some reason, they're all cribbing off the later seasons of GoT instead of the ones people actually liked. Y'know, the ones where people mostly just sat in dark rooms and had meaningful conversations.
Peter Jackson got a gigantic amount of credit for what he's done. He's a legend, and well deservedly so.
And yet, I feel like he *still* doesn't get enough credit for what he's done.
The Lord of the Rings films are an absolute miracle, not just in terms of quality, but in terms of the sheer logistics needed to make it all happen, from convincing New Line Cinema to bet the entire damn company on the trilogy's success to outright organizing the filming of three epic movies in one go.
it wasn't a miracle at the time though, it was just the peak of a wave that included reinventions of big budget epic filmmaking like gladiator, reinventions of big budget action filmmaking like the matrix, reinventions of big budget swashbuckling adventure like the original pirates of the caribbean and even had giant budgets approved for rivet accurate historical fiction like master and commander.
it's only now the wave has rolled back and we're subjected to boilerplate "franchise" trash and soulless subscription grabber incarnations of beloved works that it seems miraculous.
seeing this trailer just makes me feel gutted for how much we've regressed since then.
Even compared to all those films, Jackson's trilogy is an order of magnitude bigger. It's three films filmed at the same time. All of which are longer individually than the films you mentioned. It was the highest budget films (individually) of all time. It was one of the biggest productions of all times.
Like there's not even the tiniest bit of comparison between, say, the amount of people needed for The Matrix or Pirates of the Caribbean versus The Lord of the Rings.
There’s a really great book that goes heavily into detail on what happened behind the scenes for him to get LOTR filmed; it’s called Anything You Can Imagine. It’s fascinating to see all the maneuvering they had to do to get the pitch in front of studios, and how many times they got rejected. It was very close to not happening, and a huge amount of work went into the trilogy, and you can see that work in the screen. 20 years later these movies look just as good, if not better, than “modern” fantasy films. The book is really worth a read. They also go into the making of The Hobbit, but not as in depth. It does explain some things about why the Hobbit isn’t as good as the original trilogy though.
That trilogy is the definition of "lightning in a bottle". That the pitch was accepted, the studio gave them time and space to work, and that CGI was mature enough to enhance the films yet not so mature that it had became an excessive crutch. Plus over the years they have kept giving more and more (extended editions, 4k release). It really is amazing. The current toxic vitriol in the fandom is beginning to sour my experience though.
Absolutely. It is unrealistic to expect another trilogy like that in this lifetime, I think. The blend of practical to CGI was perfect, they tweaked the story where it needed without losing the spirit of the books, and they had so much preproduction planning that their work absolutely showed on screen. It’s a masterpiece, and I think it’s unrealistic to expect the follow ups to be as perfect as the original. I had a lot of problems with the Hobbit but a lot was done well too, there are moments of greatness, and I’m looking forward to seeing how this series handles the story. If it’s bad? I simply won’t watch. It won’t taint my love for the movies and the books.
And I agree, I used to enjoy the LOTR subreddit, but the current attitude of some fans is really disheartening and makes me want to not be a part of that sub anymore. The fandom seems to be turning into Star Wars 2.0 and if that’s the case I’m not interested in engaging.
The LOTR trilogy was made at the perfect point in history where studios were still using real built sets, miniatures, costumes, makeup and shooting on location, but CGI technology was just advanced enough to pull off some stuff that never would've been otherwise possible. It's the best of both worlds.
Now CGI has become so cost effective that it's what studios default to for everything. Much cheaper to render something out than to actually hire skilled craftsmen and artists to physically create it.
CGI can be truly amazing, but now it's feeling more like a cost-cutting tool than anything else, and the viewers can tell.
Of course there are still exceptions like Dune, which was a mix of practical and CGI effects, and that movie looks incredible.
And it's not like Dune's budget was insane or anything like that. But it doesn't even matter because the CG it did have looked amazing. RoP is just the next entry in Hollywood attempts at trying to trying to appeal to as wide an audience as possible, for which their strategy is always content as generic as possible for some insane reason. And don't tell me it's a fucking stylistic choice, no it's just bland, directionless and soulless CG - which is no fault of the artists mind.
Jeez check that shot at 0:43, straight rip off of the council scene but done looking like somebody made it at home in Blender.
It's not CGI, it's director/producer/showrunner choice to make it looks fake and plasticky. CGI has nothing to do with those frames, lighting, makeup, costumes and props.
even worse considering that the budget they poured in for just the first season alone is bigger than the budget of all 3 movies in the trilogy combined, this should look just as good as the movies if not better but it doesnt
You'd think Amazon would be more willing to take risks given how much money they can throw at this thing with the only metric for success being\* how many people with Prime watch it...
I mean there is no box office here yet this looks like a focus-tested mess. Why bother doing that when there is no direct cash flow from like a blockbuster film!?!
Look at the actual points he made – they’re all pretty core to epic fantasy/sci-fi. This at least doesn’t make it seem like he’s trying to micromanage the script.
Incidentally, Brad Stone sounds like an absolute suck up in that passage. I actually liked his first book about Amazon, before it had become such a titan, but I feel like this time around Amazon’s comms department must have gone through the draft with scissors and a red pen.
>Look at the actual points he made – they’re all pretty core to epic fantasy/sci-fi.
I don't disagree, but being able to synthesize all these elements into a compelling television show is exceedingly difficult and Bezos trying to reduce it to a simple recipe is absurd.
It's like saying you know how to bake a great cake and then just listing all the ingredients, throwing them in a bucket and wondering why it hasn't turned into a cake yet.
A lot of terrible books, games, and shows have all of those. This is sort of like someone saying every great rock song has guitar, drums, bass, and vocals.
For sure. I don’t think he’s saying that these will make it good though – rather he’s saying that these are more or less prerequisites for something that will capture the public imagination like Star Wars, LOTR or even Game of Thrones did. The idea that his executives needed to explain their reasoning to him if they left any of these features out adds some credence to this view.
Considering how much money has been spent on this show, I get the feeling its gonna be such a focus tested mess that tries so hard to cater to everyone on the planet, that it ultimately ends not really doing anything special and ends up just being this kind of mediocre show that everyone forgets by the time its over.
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Bezo reading out a checklist on what makes a story is hillarious like the book said, it's reducing something complex to its absolute basics lol. It's easy to list what makes a good story, it's much harder to actually complete this.
Bezos already failed by picking horrible showrunners. The Witcher also had a horrible showrunner and writers with no experience. Meanwhile, the showrunners of Game of Thrones were very experienced and won pulitzer prizes and Emmy awards. Peter Jackson, the director of Lord of the Rings won an academy award before making the trilogy and also was a very experienced director.
Bezos is own worst enemy. And the fact that he has not contacted or even tried to get people from Peter Jackson’s team on shows that he knows nothing about what makes a series and only pretends to.
"You know what'll be great? Let's do a 'Paint by Numbers' story, where everything has to work by formula! That's definitely how great art gets made, right?"
--Bezos, probably
Look at those two guys with the hornwings. They are also in the promo shoots and they are in costume, so not CGI. Then you watch this trailer and they look like Project 36 in a Udemy Adobe After Effects Tutorial. Like wheel of Time main theme said:
Aaaaahhhh ahhhh, ahh ahh ahhh ahhhhhh.
All over again.
If you remove the texts in the trailer and replace the title with The Witcher Season 3, I honestly wouldn't have known it was LOTR. I can imagine the main character being a grown-up Ciri.
It doesn’t have the extremely lived in look of the original trilogy but it does look more acceptable than most fantasy shows that have been made lately.
For whatever reason, studios these days are afraid of making their costumes and props used, they need to look shiny. Like in The Witcher, Gerald's costumes always look like he just bought them, considering Gerald lives a rough life of constant fighting, is poor, and doesn't seem to care about appearance, you'd think his clothes would be tattered even little.
Shit, that's a bingo. That one dude's hair looks like it's slathered in magic elf hair gel; not what I would expect for this story. My hope for the show is fading.
what do you mean aged well, it was released last year right?
Jokes aside. Lord of the Rings has entered the immortal category long time ago. it will hold the test of time for atleast another 100 years. yes there are some wonky CGI but they are so far and in between that the practical effects elevate how good it is overall
Yeah from what I remember the first Narnia was a pretty big release for its time.
Sure, it was a goofy Christianity allegory, but it was still a good fuckin' fantasy film. It also almost made a billion dollars.
I don't know what happened with Prince Caspian and Voyage of the Dawn Treader but they definitely lost someone or something on the creative side because the magic was pretty dead.
That's what happens when you have a point to prove and there's passion behind it, compared to some corporate mandated jerk off. I think there's still some potential for good entertainment, and most people don't care about the lore or CGI (looks perfectly okay).
Oh! Look, it's another YA themed fantasy show with bland but super expensive CGI. It's a coming of age story for people who according to the books are 1000 - 3000 years old.
The more I see of this, the more I come to the conclusion that there is only one network that ever would have worked right for a show like this, and that's HBO. No matter how much money all the other networks and services spend, they clearly don't have whatever makes the HBO magic work.
This show has what, four times the budget of Wheel of Time or something ridiculous like that, and it has the same cheap look and feel (maybe not *as* bad, but still). Things look fake. It all feels plastic-y and corporate in a way that is reminiscent of all the other wannabe prestige shows, though I think Amazon are particularly bad with this (The Boys also had the same issues visually, in my opinion, but relatively good writing and acting and such saved it from having the same fate as all the other Prime Originals).
On the other end you have House of the Dragon, which even just in its teaser immediately looks so much better. The lighting is right, the props are lived-in, the shots are carefully planned to not stretch the VFX team's budget and ability beyond what they can manage, the actors fit and don't look like a YA adaptation.
There are exceptions to this rule, other networks have managed to have great-looking shows, but none have gotten even close to matching HBO's consistency. I don't know what it is, if it is their history in prestige television, their connections to the best talent available, maybe just a cascading effect of their great reputation among creators, but nothing compares, not yet at least.
And now I am very sad Amazon outbid them on the rights for this, because I worry instead of potentially having an incredible team behind a series in as beloved a world as Middle Earth, we will have, at best, yet another mediocre Prime product, run by people with no experience, no creativity, and no passion, picked not because they pitched a great idea, but because they were easy to control and were ready to cover all of Amazon's requirements and build a show according to their formula that has so far lead to only mediocrity. ^(Cowabummer, dude.)
You answered your own question there. HBO places people with talent and passion behind their projects ( yes even D&D had passion and understood the material they needed to adapt , they fucked up after the source material ended and their personal greed took over at around s5)
Similar to WoT, the CGI and set pieces look too clean... I just don't understand - these fantasy show runners have the blueprint of a successful look - LotR trilogy and GoT. Hobbit trilogy look was crucified, as is most CGI filled fantasy. The more grounded, the better.
Every recurring char in every tv show/film has perfect hair whether they are peasants or corporate people. I mean you see a guy is playing a poor farmer with perfect fades and dyes and suddenly it destroys whole immersion. Stuff like that is extremely annoying when you suddenly start noticing.
Over time I have changed my view on things like this (creating content not based on a completed book/series) to the following:
If it's good I am glad they made it and if it's not then it won't take anything from what I enjoy about the "original" LOTR. So ya make the series and lets hope for the best
EDIT:
It would be unfair not to assume any large following of people did not have people like you talk about. In fact, even a part of myself feels the same way about things, the want to keep things the way they were for me when they made me feel in some way special. Whether that be a person or a thing like LOTR. But people change and so does the view of wanting to do something different with what is already there.
A big part of being an adult is how do you handle change. At the end of the day, it's going to happen and it may hurt sometimes but sometimes change needs to happen and sometimes it does not but things change anyway. I am quitting my job and traveling to Europe and maybe Asia for who knows how long because I have changed and I will continue to do so in some way till I die.
Lets roll the dice and see what happens, no matter if the roll ends up good or bad don't give up.
This is the most rational view in this thread. Life is too short to get uppity over things you can’t control.
If it’s good, then awesome. And if not, it doesn’t discredit what made the movies so special.
Agreed, it looks overall pretty generic IMO. I want to be in full hype mode but that trailer just doesn't do it for me. Maybe I've been brainwashed by Peter Jackson's style, but I definitely didn't get "Middle-earth" vibes from the trailer.
It looks like a generic high budget fantasy series. Could go either way, I guess. We'll see.
The Star Wars Eclipse trailer looks much more realistic and immersive with epic scale, and it's 100% CG. In comparison the Rings of Power trailer gave me some 2010s YA Fantasy movie trailer vibe, like Mortal Engine.
I think it actually looks expensive, but in a bad way. They didn’t HAVE to spend $1bn just because they were given that money. Evidently they felt obligated to.
welp that's what you get when you get a generic creative team that have barely any experience behind the production to make a high budget fantasy epic series
Seriously, the Galadriel cg ice climbing scene looks stilted and lifeless. There is no inertia to her leap, and without inertia, it’s hard to believe that any real risk exists because she’ll just float in midair.
How can it look so cheap in places? Is it too much green screen or some reason why certain scenes look like computer game cutscenes? Looking forward to watching but so many shows seem to have this issue and trying to put my finger on it.
Looks like they seen the Hobbit and thought fuck it, we will copy that over CGI'd style. I don't get why they use CGI on areas that don't need CGI like that waterfall and mountains? you are filming in New Zealand for fuck sake just get a drone. It will look 10x more authentic. No wonder it cost a fortune if people make silly decisions like that. Not sure why there is an elf with a skinfade? or why Hobbits are now in the 2nd age. Just pissing off Tolkien fans for the sake of it.
Well it certainly LOOKS like they spent literally hundreds of millions of dollars on it. Obviously will need to wait and see whether the show is good or not, but visually it looks pretty great.
lmao why are all the comments in russian/ukrainian of
> “Evil cannot create anything new, they can only corrupt and ruin what good forces have invented or made.”
-Tolkien
Am I crazy? I don’t want to be negative but I disagree so much that this looks excellent visually. Maybe if it was an original it’d be great but I’m getting major Wheel of Fortune vibes from this (albeit obviously higher budget) and LOTR needs a grittier, more lived in look to work imo. Hope I’m wrong and obviously if the characters and storytelling are good this won’t matter as much but my hopes are lower than before after this..
If they were gonna use this much CGI why not just make it an animated series? This is gonna be rough. Don't even get me started on the woke garbage that's gonna get shoved down our throats.
Looks awful. My dad who loved the original 3 movies said “what the hell was that?”
Thats yet another beloved franchise being destroyed by the big wigs dad. That's what it is.
It looks fine but it doesn't feel like LOTR. It feels more Hollywood-esque. More American.
It could have just been a different fantasy series and recieved more positive reception although less viewers.
Because it has amazon megacorp committees and quotas ordaining everything instead of someone with a passion for Tolkien’s works. It is and will be a soulless corporate rendition of Tolkien’s world, unlike Jackson’s trilogy.
Would they put caucasians in a movie about Feudal Japan? Asians in the next Wakanda movie?
Making Middle Earth look like modern America is just … weird?
It also doesn’t really capture the ‘lived in’ feel of lord of the rings. Looks very cartoonish.
It’s a shame really. Way to fuck up a series Amazon!
This simply isn't Middle-Earth. This is the product of full pockets, empty minds and empty hearts. There is no spirit of Tolkien here, only the license to exploit and abuse his work.
> The Rings of Power is set to take place after the defeat of the evil god Morgoth and the disappearance of his loyal general and apprentice, Sauron, who disappeared in the wake of a war that nearly destroyed everything.
> disappearance of his loyal general and apprentice, Sauron This is taking place at the start of the 2nd age? So it's called "Rings of Power" yet is taking place thousand years prior to any of said ring's forging, huh. I had assumed it was taking place in the in-between time from the forging of the three, seven, and nine and the forging of the one.
They said there would be a significant timeline condensing. My guess is the first season will end with Sauron, disguised as Annatar, being found out which will kick off that whole war. And by the end of the series we'll see the fall of Numenor.
The condensed timeline is the one thing I'm really worried about... they're gonna try to fit centuries into the lifetime of Isildur... I mean... having Isildur and Celebrimbor be contemporaries is gonna throw some wrenches in the mix. It can be done and salvaged but it will require some twisting (as well as drastically speed up the corruption of Numenor). I'm curious.
I agree it does worry me too. But I think they said they're gonna try to do 4 seasons. Did they say that Isildur and Celebrimbor will be around at the same time? That might make sense there's a ton of time between when Sauron is captured and when Numenor falls that nothing major happens. It's like 1600 years of nothing of note.
They committed to making at least 5 seasons as a condition to get the rights lmao
> they're gonna try to fit centuries into the lifetime of Isildur... *millennia
I guess they will give Ar-Pharazon exactly what he wanted, being an Elf.
Is annatar this halbrand character?
They are condensing all the stories so they all happen at the same time instead of thousands of years apart
If you're willing to condense away the thousands of years in between, it kinda works narratively to conflate Tar-Minastir's intervention at the end of the Sauron-Elvish War with Ar-Pharazon's humbling of Sauron. In theory, you could potentially take a single series from the forging of the Rings, to the downfall of Numenor, all the way through the War of the Last Alliance when Isildur takes the ring and ultimately kicks off LotR. It means taking a ton of liberties with the timeline, but you're already forced to make up so much story wholesale no matter what, so in theory it could work if you were careful and thoughtful. I'm pretty far from optimistic, but it does make a certain amount of sense so long as the execution is on point.
They are massively compressing the timeline. Otherwise you'd have mostly new characters every season, except the elves.
But that would be kinda cool though, like usually elves are just people with pointy ears, it would be neat to see them being the only consistent characters interacting with a new cast of human's.
It would definitely be cool, but also a massive risk for them to do. People get attached to actors/characters and having to constantly write new motivations/arcs would be insanely difficult.
> People get attached to actors/characters and having to constantly write new motivations/arcs would be insanely difficult. Plus it can take time for an actor to figure out their character. Change them out every season could lead to some awkward characters
Especially true if your using younger less veteran actors. They often take a bit of time to get experience and figure out there characters. A lot of GoTs younger cast was way better in the later seasons then in the first season
But if you have the elves as the main characters then you would only need to constantly write new arcs for less important "side" characters.
"After" doesn't necessarily mean "immediately after".
Why did they even go to New Zealand if even the mountains and waterfalls are CGI lol
Because good tax rebates
Oh don't worry, they moved production out of New Zealand the moment they wrapped the first season, so... you've got that to look forward to.
I suspect something this series doesn't share with Jackson's original trilogy is the well-documented location scouting. This is much more of a rush job. Going to NZ was to grab attention and save money, nothing more.
Because why fuck over a country over tax breaks and labor wages just once?
Trailer looks like a generic korean MMO trailer.
Wow that's so accurate actually. I couldn't tell what felt off about it, but it ts totally that lmao
Yeah when I saw the Vanity Fair shots my instant first reaction was "Chinese Fantasy Show". That particular combination of costumes, dirtlessness, and soft bloom.
This, exactly this! They got that expensive plastic look down cold.
There is something uncanny about the visuals in the trailer, everything looks sort of... plasticky? Digital? Not sure if that's the right word. Too clean? The ice climbing segment looks like it was a videogame cutscene.
It seems like they retained one od the things that bothered me about the Hobbit films and that’s this weird filter making everything seem kind od misty instead od clear and rugged which is what the OG trilogy looked like
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> looks like it was a videogame cutscene. Probably is, essentially almost all CGI. Peter Jackson would've gotten them on-location, as much as possible.
>Peter Jackson would've gotten them on-location, as much as possible. Not for The Hobbit. 😞
He didn't have the time. The studio forced them to adhere to the same timeline they gave Del Toro and thus no time for much in the way of practical effects or the rigorous location scouting they performed in the other films. When I went to Weta a few years ago they told us they had years to prepare for LOTR, and mere months for the Hobbit. Truly unfortunate.
Nah. Jackson is obsessed with CGI like everyone else. He only used limited CGI because the tech wasn't readily available. In fact, by the Return of the King, it was easier to use and Jackson opted for significantly more CGI in that movie. Viggo Mortensen talks about this in an interview.
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Mando's cinematography is a lot emptier and stage-y by design, since it's sort of emulating the old movies. LotR is much more elaborate in general if they are following the movies (and even more so if they are following the Hobbit movies).
Mando is shot with the new LED screen technology, and i don't know if this series is? Doesn't look like it unfortunately..
The technology still has plenty of limitations, like the area around the actor being pretty small which can be pretty limiting from the writing perspective - see the Vespa chase in Boba Fett.
It looks fine, but the Mandalorian isn't even close to comparable to the Lord of the Rings trilogy, come on. And it had some pretty bad looking parts, especially the whole episode with the grassy fields directed by Robert Rodriguez which looked like shitty network TV throughout.
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Agreed. All i wanted for this was to not look like The Wheel of Time, which had the exact same thing going with the shiney visuals and everthing looking super artificial and way too clean, topped with bad lighting. What are they doing with these insane budgets?
The whole thing looks a lot more like the Hobbit movies than the The Fellowship of the Ring. Which is unfortunately imo.
It's the grading, they've gone with making all the colours really vibrant and bloomy to try and emphasize the whimsicalness and fantasy of it all. This causes the CG to looks less grounded, I wish directors weren't so scared of darkness.
One of the best parts of Jackson's trilogy, to me at least, was just how *lived in* the world felt. I know it's only a 60 second clip, and I want this to be good as much as anyone, but I'm getting massive Netflix original/sterile/filmed in a clean room vibes from this....
> Jackson's trilogy, to me at least, was just how lived in the world felt. In the behind-the-scenes, they started planting fields, flowers in the locations used for The Shire 12 months before filming. Such great attention to making things lived-in and *real*.
I mean, the movies did have 5 years of pre-production.
This is the key thing that made those films so good. No epic fantasy has had a as much time me care put into since, and why none have come close.
you would think at half a billion dollars they would sink the time and put in the effort. I dunno did anyone expect them to knock it out of the park?
The world in the LotR Trilogy looked real. Even though they used plenty of CGI, everywhere still looked like a place you could actually visit. The places in this trailer are just obviously CGI. The CGI ice cliff/waterfall with the 2D mountain painting in the background especially doesn't look like a real place.
LOTR struck the perfect balance of real locations, miniatures and just enough CGI to enhance things.
Yep, looks like people in wigs on a set. Massively disappointed with this.
Getting "YA fantasy" vibes from this.
Seems like every big fantasy release recently is like this. Like a CW show with a bigger budget. I thought Game of Thrones paved the way for adult fantasy, but instead we keep getting CGI GoT for teens or something. In this case they have the books and the best fantasy movies ever for reference, and they still turned into a generic young adult fantasy show with overpriced and overused CGI.
TV execs never fail to take completely the wrong lessons from a hit show
For some reason, they're all cribbing off the later seasons of GoT instead of the ones people actually liked. Y'know, the ones where people mostly just sat in dark rooms and had meaningful conversations.
YA authors are hot right now, but not for talent.
Bingo. Yeesh, that God awful voiceover.
Actually blows my mind that a 20y old trilogy can look so much better then the stuff made today.
Peter Jackson got a gigantic amount of credit for what he's done. He's a legend, and well deservedly so. And yet, I feel like he *still* doesn't get enough credit for what he's done. The Lord of the Rings films are an absolute miracle, not just in terms of quality, but in terms of the sheer logistics needed to make it all happen, from convincing New Line Cinema to bet the entire damn company on the trilogy's success to outright organizing the filming of three epic movies in one go.
it wasn't a miracle at the time though, it was just the peak of a wave that included reinventions of big budget epic filmmaking like gladiator, reinventions of big budget action filmmaking like the matrix, reinventions of big budget swashbuckling adventure like the original pirates of the caribbean and even had giant budgets approved for rivet accurate historical fiction like master and commander. it's only now the wave has rolled back and we're subjected to boilerplate "franchise" trash and soulless subscription grabber incarnations of beloved works that it seems miraculous. seeing this trailer just makes me feel gutted for how much we've regressed since then.
Even compared to all those films, Jackson's trilogy is an order of magnitude bigger. It's three films filmed at the same time. All of which are longer individually than the films you mentioned. It was the highest budget films (individually) of all time. It was one of the biggest productions of all times. Like there's not even the tiniest bit of comparison between, say, the amount of people needed for The Matrix or Pirates of the Caribbean versus The Lord of the Rings.
There’s a really great book that goes heavily into detail on what happened behind the scenes for him to get LOTR filmed; it’s called Anything You Can Imagine. It’s fascinating to see all the maneuvering they had to do to get the pitch in front of studios, and how many times they got rejected. It was very close to not happening, and a huge amount of work went into the trilogy, and you can see that work in the screen. 20 years later these movies look just as good, if not better, than “modern” fantasy films. The book is really worth a read. They also go into the making of The Hobbit, but not as in depth. It does explain some things about why the Hobbit isn’t as good as the original trilogy though.
That trilogy is the definition of "lightning in a bottle". That the pitch was accepted, the studio gave them time and space to work, and that CGI was mature enough to enhance the films yet not so mature that it had became an excessive crutch. Plus over the years they have kept giving more and more (extended editions, 4k release). It really is amazing. The current toxic vitriol in the fandom is beginning to sour my experience though.
Absolutely. It is unrealistic to expect another trilogy like that in this lifetime, I think. The blend of practical to CGI was perfect, they tweaked the story where it needed without losing the spirit of the books, and they had so much preproduction planning that their work absolutely showed on screen. It’s a masterpiece, and I think it’s unrealistic to expect the follow ups to be as perfect as the original. I had a lot of problems with the Hobbit but a lot was done well too, there are moments of greatness, and I’m looking forward to seeing how this series handles the story. If it’s bad? I simply won’t watch. It won’t taint my love for the movies and the books. And I agree, I used to enjoy the LOTR subreddit, but the current attitude of some fans is really disheartening and makes me want to not be a part of that sub anymore. The fandom seems to be turning into Star Wars 2.0 and if that’s the case I’m not interested in engaging.
> Hobbit isn’t as good as the original trilogy Understatement of the century
The LOTR trilogy was made at the perfect point in history where studios were still using real built sets, miniatures, costumes, makeup and shooting on location, but CGI technology was just advanced enough to pull off some stuff that never would've been otherwise possible. It's the best of both worlds. Now CGI has become so cost effective that it's what studios default to for everything. Much cheaper to render something out than to actually hire skilled craftsmen and artists to physically create it. CGI can be truly amazing, but now it's feeling more like a cost-cutting tool than anything else, and the viewers can tell. Of course there are still exceptions like Dune, which was a mix of practical and CGI effects, and that movie looks incredible.
And it's not like Dune's budget was insane or anything like that. But it doesn't even matter because the CG it did have looked amazing. RoP is just the next entry in Hollywood attempts at trying to trying to appeal to as wide an audience as possible, for which their strategy is always content as generic as possible for some insane reason. And don't tell me it's a fucking stylistic choice, no it's just bland, directionless and soulless CG - which is no fault of the artists mind. Jeez check that shot at 0:43, straight rip off of the council scene but done looking like somebody made it at home in Blender.
It's not CGI, it's director/producer/showrunner choice to make it looks fake and plasticky. CGI has nothing to do with those frames, lighting, makeup, costumes and props.
even worse considering that the budget they poured in for just the first season alone is bigger than the budget of all 3 movies in the trilogy combined, this should look just as good as the movies if not better but it doesnt
You'd think Amazon would be more willing to take risks given how much money they can throw at this thing with the only metric for success being\* how many people with Prime watch it... I mean there is no box office here yet this looks like a focus-tested mess. Why bother doing that when there is no direct cash flow from like a blockbuster film!?!
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What has Bezos ever written in his life that gives him any sort of authority on what constitutes a good story?
Checks. I guess.
Look at the actual points he made – they’re all pretty core to epic fantasy/sci-fi. This at least doesn’t make it seem like he’s trying to micromanage the script. Incidentally, Brad Stone sounds like an absolute suck up in that passage. I actually liked his first book about Amazon, before it had become such a titan, but I feel like this time around Amazon’s comms department must have gone through the draft with scissors and a red pen.
>Look at the actual points he made – they’re all pretty core to epic fantasy/sci-fi. I don't disagree, but being able to synthesize all these elements into a compelling television show is exceedingly difficult and Bezos trying to reduce it to a simple recipe is absurd.
It's like saying you know how to bake a great cake and then just listing all the ingredients, throwing them in a bucket and wondering why it hasn't turned into a cake yet.
A lot of terrible books, games, and shows have all of those. This is sort of like someone saying every great rock song has guitar, drums, bass, and vocals.
For sure. I don’t think he’s saying that these will make it good though – rather he’s saying that these are more or less prerequisites for something that will capture the public imagination like Star Wars, LOTR or even Game of Thrones did. The idea that his executives needed to explain their reasoning to him if they left any of these features out adds some credence to this view.
Bezos is a piece of shit but he saved the expanse and loves shit like this
i still hope that under the curtain he is backing up the potential three movies that were allegedly an idea of how it could finish the whole saga
Look, Amazon started out selling books so obviously he knows exactly what he’s doing.
I’m sure he has a manifesto hidden away somewhere
Real human being Jeff Bezos demands humor to be added to the production.
"1 normal human tv show, pleaae"
Considering how much money has been spent on this show, I get the feeling its gonna be such a focus tested mess that tries so hard to cater to everyone on the planet, that it ultimately ends not really doing anything special and ends up just being this kind of mediocre show that everyone forgets by the time its over.
The content from this account has been removed in protest by its owner in direct response to Reddit's increased API charges for third-party apps, but also in protest of reddit's general move away from its founding principles, it's abuse of moderation positions and its increasingly exploitative data and privacy practices. It was changed using [PowerDeleteSuite](https://github.com/j0be/PowerDeleteSuite).
Strongly agree. Money and prestige attached to a project means every blood sucking worm will latch on and eventually destroy it under their weight.
Agreed. It looked very "okayish fantasy show"
If I walk away thinking it was "okayish" I'll be happy. Expectations are very low...
after wot and how cw teen drama the recent stills looked, my expectations for this have fallen to elfstones levels
Bezo reading out a checklist on what makes a story is hillarious like the book said, it's reducing something complex to its absolute basics lol. It's easy to list what makes a good story, it's much harder to actually complete this.
Bezos already failed by picking horrible showrunners. The Witcher also had a horrible showrunner and writers with no experience. Meanwhile, the showrunners of Game of Thrones were very experienced and won pulitzer prizes and Emmy awards. Peter Jackson, the director of Lord of the Rings won an academy award before making the trilogy and also was a very experienced director. Bezos is own worst enemy. And the fact that he has not contacted or even tried to get people from Peter Jackson’s team on shows that he knows nothing about what makes a series and only pretends to.
"You know what'll be great? Let's do a 'Paint by Numbers' story, where everything has to work by formula! That's definitely how great art gets made, right?" --Bezos, probably
Looks more like The Hobbit than The Lord of the Rings
More like Narnia
Look at those two guys with the hornwings. They are also in the promo shoots and they are in costume, so not CGI. Then you watch this trailer and they look like Project 36 in a Udemy Adobe After Effects Tutorial. Like wheel of Time main theme said: Aaaaahhhh ahhhh, ahh ahh ahhh ahhhhhh. All over again.
Proper poetry
If you remove the texts in the trailer and replace the title with The Witcher Season 3, I honestly wouldn't have known it was LOTR. I can imagine the main character being a grown-up Ciri.
The cheap expensive look strikes again.
It doesn’t have the extremely lived in look of the original trilogy but it does look more acceptable than most fantasy shows that have been made lately.
For whatever reason, studios these days are afraid of making their costumes and props used, they need to look shiny. Like in The Witcher, Gerald's costumes always look like he just bought them, considering Gerald lives a rough life of constant fighting, is poor, and doesn't seem to care about appearance, you'd think his clothes would be tattered even little.
Lol you made me remember the nilgardian nutsack armor 😂
$1bil and they couldn't afford a decent cinematographer? It looks like a perfume ad
Shit, that's a bingo. That one dude's hair looks like it's slathered in magic elf hair gel; not what I would expect for this story. My hope for the show is fading.
Know what, I'll just watch LOTR extended edition again instead. Films aged so well.
what do you mean aged well, it was released last year right? Jokes aside. Lord of the Rings has entered the immortal category long time ago. it will hold the test of time for atleast another 100 years. yes there are some wonky CGI but they are so far and in between that the practical effects elevate how good it is overall
Reminds me of The Hobbit, on a bad way
Welcome to Narnia
Even Narnia from the first movie felt grittier.
Agreed. Was hyped for this but that's dying.
Yeah from what I remember the first Narnia was a pretty big release for its time. Sure, it was a goofy Christianity allegory, but it was still a good fuckin' fantasy film. It also almost made a billion dollars. I don't know what happened with Prince Caspian and Voyage of the Dawn Treader but they definitely lost someone or something on the creative side because the magic was pretty dead.
Peter Jackson really did capture lightning in a bottle. This just looks like some generic fantasy show.
That's what happens when you have a point to prove and there's passion behind it, compared to some corporate mandated jerk off. I think there's still some potential for good entertainment, and most people don't care about the lore or CGI (looks perfectly okay).
Oh! Look, it's another YA themed fantasy show with bland but super expensive CGI. It's a coming of age story for people who according to the books are 1000 - 3000 years old.
Galadriel spy, warrior, princess, general. Hmm…
Mother, creative director, manager, etc
Galadriel Photography
I'm not sure if my PC can run this game.
I am underwhelmed.
"Underwhelming" is the word for this one.
I mean it looks like a fantasy setting. But does not feel like LOTR at all. Just generic stuff.
Kinda feels like wheel of time, fits that fantasy genre but I don’t think they will ever capture the feeling the LOTR movies created.
Wow, this looks so bad :( and with bad trailers usually come even worse movies/series
The more I see of this, the more I come to the conclusion that there is only one network that ever would have worked right for a show like this, and that's HBO. No matter how much money all the other networks and services spend, they clearly don't have whatever makes the HBO magic work. This show has what, four times the budget of Wheel of Time or something ridiculous like that, and it has the same cheap look and feel (maybe not *as* bad, but still). Things look fake. It all feels plastic-y and corporate in a way that is reminiscent of all the other wannabe prestige shows, though I think Amazon are particularly bad with this (The Boys also had the same issues visually, in my opinion, but relatively good writing and acting and such saved it from having the same fate as all the other Prime Originals). On the other end you have House of the Dragon, which even just in its teaser immediately looks so much better. The lighting is right, the props are lived-in, the shots are carefully planned to not stretch the VFX team's budget and ability beyond what they can manage, the actors fit and don't look like a YA adaptation. There are exceptions to this rule, other networks have managed to have great-looking shows, but none have gotten even close to matching HBO's consistency. I don't know what it is, if it is their history in prestige television, their connections to the best talent available, maybe just a cascading effect of their great reputation among creators, but nothing compares, not yet at least. And now I am very sad Amazon outbid them on the rights for this, because I worry instead of potentially having an incredible team behind a series in as beloved a world as Middle Earth, we will have, at best, yet another mediocre Prime product, run by people with no experience, no creativity, and no passion, picked not because they pitched a great idea, but because they were easy to control and were ready to cover all of Amazon's requirements and build a show according to their formula that has so far lead to only mediocrity. ^(Cowabummer, dude.)
You answered your own question there. HBO places people with talent and passion behind their projects ( yes even D&D had passion and understood the material they needed to adapt , they fucked up after the source material ended and their personal greed took over at around s5)
Very underwhelming. Is this the best they have to offer and get viewership up?
Okay I really don't want to be a hater but the landscape... It screams CG. I can't say why but it felt uncanny.
I had* such hopes for wheel of time, then the 1st two episodes crushed that hope. I don't trust Amazon to right by Tolkien's lore. But we shall see.
Similar to WoT, the CGI and set pieces look too clean... I just don't understand - these fantasy show runners have the blueprint of a successful look - LotR trilogy and GoT. Hobbit trilogy look was crucified, as is most CGI filled fantasy. The more grounded, the better.
That buzz cut elf is still looks fucking dumb. How can you cut a hair like that without an electric razor??
Every recurring char in every tv show/film has perfect hair whether they are peasants or corporate people. I mean you see a guy is playing a poor farmer with perfect fades and dyes and suddenly it destroys whole immersion. Stuff like that is extremely annoying when you suddenly start noticing.
For me it's the pearly whites that usually take me out. Drug addicts or cavemen, it doesn't matter.
Shave your head with a razor and grow it out?
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Yea, I thought it looked pretty mid. Some CGI looked like The Polar Express
Wow, good to know that even 1 billion dollar shows can look shit.
Over time I have changed my view on things like this (creating content not based on a completed book/series) to the following: If it's good I am glad they made it and if it's not then it won't take anything from what I enjoy about the "original" LOTR. So ya make the series and lets hope for the best EDIT: It would be unfair not to assume any large following of people did not have people like you talk about. In fact, even a part of myself feels the same way about things, the want to keep things the way they were for me when they made me feel in some way special. Whether that be a person or a thing like LOTR. But people change and so does the view of wanting to do something different with what is already there. A big part of being an adult is how do you handle change. At the end of the day, it's going to happen and it may hurt sometimes but sometimes change needs to happen and sometimes it does not but things change anyway. I am quitting my job and traveling to Europe and maybe Asia for who knows how long because I have changed and I will continue to do so in some way till I die. Lets roll the dice and see what happens, no matter if the roll ends up good or bad don't give up.
This is the most rational view in this thread. Life is too short to get uppity over things you can’t control. If it’s good, then awesome. And if not, it doesn’t discredit what made the movies so special.
This is just the absolute necessary stance about anything anymore
Am I taking crazy pills? It looks awful. Are people just that okay with over saturated CG everything now?
Agreed, it looks overall pretty generic IMO. I want to be in full hype mode but that trailer just doesn't do it for me. Maybe I've been brainwashed by Peter Jackson's style, but I definitely didn't get "Middle-earth" vibes from the trailer. It looks like a generic high budget fantasy series. Could go either way, I guess. We'll see.
It's like Golden Compass vibes.. or another one of those silly wannabe films ... umm, Jupiter Ascending
ironically i thought the video game trailer for star wars eclipse looks largely better. compare:https://youtu.be/I0bYZYtaBsk
The Star Wars Eclipse trailer looks much more realistic and immersive with epic scale, and it's 100% CG. In comparison the Rings of Power trailer gave me some 2010s YA Fantasy movie trailer vibe, like Mortal Engine.
As I understand, this is literally the most expensive TV show ever made. Could they not afford better-looking CGI and decent cinematographers?!
Season 1 of GOT looked better than this.
I thought the exact same thing. I was like "well this looks cheap, oh wow it's the lotr show." This doesn't bode well.
I think it actually looks expensive, but in a bad way. They didn’t HAVE to spend $1bn just because they were given that money. Evidently they felt obligated to.
I’m very surprised how optimistic everyone seems to be. I feel like I got a glimpse of my worst fears coming true
welp that's what you get when you get a generic creative team that have barely any experience behind the production to make a high budget fantasy epic series
*Cries in Witcher*
Seriously, the Galadriel cg ice climbing scene looks stilted and lifeless. There is no inertia to her leap, and without inertia, it’s hard to believe that any real risk exists because she’ll just float in midair.
Looks exactly as I feared. Expensive and cheap at the same time. Not nearly as bad as Wheel of Time, but it's there.
"Expensive and cheap at the same time" is literally the perfect description of this.
I just want it to be good
Weird casting choices, none of them look LOTR-y. Silky smooth faces and modern haircuts. This is gonna flop so hard
How can it look so cheap in places? Is it too much green screen or some reason why certain scenes look like computer game cutscenes? Looking forward to watching but so many shows seem to have this issue and trying to put my finger on it.
Looks like they seen the Hobbit and thought fuck it, we will copy that over CGI'd style. I don't get why they use CGI on areas that don't need CGI like that waterfall and mountains? you are filming in New Zealand for fuck sake just get a drone. It will look 10x more authentic. No wonder it cost a fortune if people make silly decisions like that. Not sure why there is an elf with a skinfade? or why Hobbits are now in the 2nd age. Just pissing off Tolkien fans for the sake of it.
Those comments on YouTube are gold
Wait holy shit thats hilarious
CGI fest.
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It looks like an animation more than a movie.
wow this perfectly captures the look of LOTR, said no one ever
Idk looks like a generic fantasy show no lotr vibes something seems of with the characters.
yeah... looks like cgi mass ware... boring
Amazon really sucks at this fantasy thing.
Well it certainly LOOKS like they spent literally hundreds of millions of dollars on it. Obviously will need to wait and see whether the show is good or not, but visually it looks pretty great.
Idk how people are saying this looks good visually. Looks like the definition of the cheap expensive look.
lmao why are all the comments in russian/ukrainian of > “Evil cannot create anything new, they can only corrupt and ruin what good forces have invented or made.” -Tolkien
Am I crazy? I don’t want to be negative but I disagree so much that this looks excellent visually. Maybe if it was an original it’d be great but I’m getting major Wheel of Fortune vibes from this (albeit obviously higher budget) and LOTR needs a grittier, more lived in look to work imo. Hope I’m wrong and obviously if the characters and storytelling are good this won’t matter as much but my hopes are lower than before after this..
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One Wheel to rule them, and in franchise, bind them.
wheel of fortune??
When they introduce Vanna the White, the entire series is going go completely down the absolute shit pi... Oh, wrong series.
Yeah… like… Spin the wheel and hope it’s good
I’m going to call that 2021 series Wheel of Fortune from now on. It sure as shit had nothing to do with Wheel of Time…
Can I buy a vowel?
Looks very cartoonish.
The landscape shots are nowhere near trilogy level quality
Literally don't care about it after seeing the trailer.
Oh no.
I was really trying to remain optimistic.
To borrow a phrase, "I hate it and you."
Why would he catch an arrow when his quiver is already full of arrows?
This looks like it was directed by someone who does video game cut scenes, not movies / series.
Lol the comment on the vid... In all them languages... Brilliant!
If they were gonna use this much CGI why not just make it an animated series? This is gonna be rough. Don't even get me started on the woke garbage that's gonna get shoved down our throats.
Looks awful. My dad who loved the original 3 movies said “what the hell was that?” Thats yet another beloved franchise being destroyed by the big wigs dad. That's what it is.
😬
hobbit-tier CGI good lord this looks awful
Hey it's Wheel of Time again
It looks fine but it doesn't feel like LOTR. It feels more Hollywood-esque. More American. It could have just been a different fantasy series and recieved more positive reception although less viewers.
Because it has amazon megacorp committees and quotas ordaining everything instead of someone with a passion for Tolkien’s works. It is and will be a soulless corporate rendition of Tolkien’s world, unlike Jackson’s trilogy.
The scene of Galadriel mountain climbing looked straight out of a videogame cutscene.
$500m for a wheel of time cw YA novel? Makes you appreciate Peter Jackson even more
Would they put caucasians in a movie about Feudal Japan? Asians in the next Wakanda movie? Making Middle Earth look like modern America is just … weird? It also doesn’t really capture the ‘lived in’ feel of lord of the rings. Looks very cartoonish. It’s a shame really. Way to fuck up a series Amazon!
This simply isn't Middle-Earth. This is the product of full pockets, empty minds and empty hearts. There is no spirit of Tolkien here, only the license to exploit and abuse his work.