The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers – 2002 (WINNER)
Director, Peter Jackson returns with the sequel to the phenomenal visual blockbuster, The Fellowship of the Ring, and dose so in a way that tops its predecessor in so many ways. Not only did it completely keep up the high standards of the effects in the first film, it improved on them, and came up with new effects that floored the world with their inventiveness and absolute realism.
When talking about the effects in The Two Towers, there are two main things that come to mind. The first is the character of Gollum/Smeagol, and the second is the Battle of Helm’s Deep. Nobody had ever seen things like these two extraordinary effects, let alone the rest of the film which had more images of fantastical creatures like the Balrog, Ring Wraiths riding flying dragon-like creatures, Wargs, and Ents, trees that walked and talked, and more fantasy environments and landscapes like Edoras, Fangorn Forest, and Helm’s Deep, itself.
So first, I’ll go over Gollum. Here is a character that was so integral to the plot, that I don’t think the film could have been made if they had not found a way to make him as real and life-like as the living actors, and yet they could not have made him using a live actor, at least not in the same way as the rest of the cast. What we see of him on the screen is entirely computer generated, but there was a live actor in a motion-capture suit giving the CGI figure realistic movement that had never been done so perfectly in photo-realistic animation. And it wasn’t just the body movements that were impressively realistic. It was the unbelievable range of facial expressions, which so perfectly mimicked human emotions, that really brought the character to life.
The Battle of Helm’s Deep was really the centerpiece of the movie. The night-time sequence lasted forty minutes. There were so many things they got right. There were the wide shots that employed miniature models, both physical and digital, that gave us a sense of scale during the battle. There were ten thousand orcs in Saruman’s army, who, in the wide shots, who were all CGI. A special computer software was developed for the film which allowed each orc to have independent computer-generated appearance and movement, just one more element that added to the realism. They were so good that even the shots where Orcs were running right past the foreground of the screen, they were completely digitally created. One of the visual effects artists who worked on the film described the scene as being ninety-nine percent CGI. Simply amazing!
There were so many things that this movie got right, but mostly, I’m impressed that they were able to build upon, and improve upon the fantastic effects in the first film of the franchise. They just kept getting better and better, and the film’s Oscar win was well-deserved!