Why?? Special effects and CGI in LOTR

[King of the North]

I agree and disagree with some of wat Celebuial said. Given the quality of the visual effects done by WETA, the more the better. In my opinion, the more PJ used special effects the more of Middle Earth came to life. Looked real. But i would have to agree that the armored trolls looked very CGish, especially the one fighting Aragorn at the end. Celebuial said that

orcs don't simply look like orcs

. Well if ur comparing the RotK orcs to orcs in TT or FotR then no they don't look like orcs. And that was delliberate, because PJ wanted the Mordor Orcs to be a different breed almost. Strong more intimidating. Personally i did not like the appearance of the RotK orcs, and prefer those from TT and FotR. This is because new orcs look more human than elven, and we must remember: orcs are mutilated elves. I would have to say though that I thought Shelob was very well done. Everything about her including all the graphics and also her sound effects. I don't really understand where u are coming from saying that it was not true to Tolkien description. I too agree that Saruman's death scene could have been done better.

You did make some pretty good points

[Lathriel]

We all must remember that nobody ever tried making LOTR (except as animated) because of the amount of visual effects.

I like most of the visual effects.

I thought Shelob was EXTREMELY creepy because they made her so spidery. Even though I have watched ROTK over and over it still creeps me up and I still whisper "Look up," at the screen when Shelob is hovering above Frodo.

I like the Mumakil, and I always thought that they were slightly bigger than elephants.

Also I heard that while WETA was creating the army of the dead Pirates of the carribean came out in theatres. They discovered that what they were doing with the Army of the Dead was very close to what was done in pirates. Yet I think the end result is very neat and also very different. I like the fact that they seem to change being at once skeletal and at other times they look like their rotting flesh is still covering their bones.

However, I don't like Gothmog, he just seemed slightly unnessecary. I think they could have done without him or maybe made his deformations a little less extreme.

[Lalwendë]

I think with many of the special effects, in particular with the creation of the various creatures, the film team were lucky as they had a lot of scope to play with. Not all the creatures are fully described in the books and so they were able to bring in some of their creative ideas. I did like how the different types of Orc looked different, but the creepiest for me were easily the Moria Orcs with their huge eyes and their scuttling way of movement. Possibly a reason why the Mordor Orcs were made so grotesque was to make it more 'acceptable' to have them killed in vast numbers. It's one of our most basic instincts to feel revulsion, and if that is stirred then we could accept such events more readily, on an automatic level. But they were still a little too grotesque for me.

I thought that what was done with Shelob was good. My judgement on this was based on whether people frightened of spiders found it scary, as I like spiders, the bigger the better. And as they did indeed find her creepy then I liked what they did with Shelob. That they based her movements on real spider behaviour was all the better.

It was with the Wargs that I was disappointed, as I am sure they are meant to be more wolf-like. Instead they looked more like hyenas. But again, it could be that the team flinched from showing Wargs as slightly dog-like because we might have felt sorry for them being killed. Though how this argument squares with the scenes where horses get trampled (which I find disturbing) I'm not sure.