I believe DCKid is speaking more of whether or not a fully CGI animated character will take away from the movie or not. Jar Jar Binks was annoying, but even if his character had been an interesting one it would have been strange with the interaction between the completely rendered character. Personally, I think they can pull it off so that it all looks real enough. Remember the cave troll in FOTR? There was a certain element of surrealism to that scene with him being animated, but it didn't distract me too very much. I hope the same is the case for the Ents and Gollum.
Ok. I took it the other way.... I have faith that Peter Jackson and his team of special effects gurus can succeed in making Gollum and the Ents look 'real enough'.
I'll jump on a LOTR thread. Gets my d##k hard almost as much as that recent thread showing Britney in a dress that was see-through in the back (Ya'll do the search.) If you're willing to see "Red Dragon," the trailer (probably a good 2 or 3 minutes long?) shows before it. ("Red Dragon" is good but not great; maybe the Hannibal schtick is getting tired.) Gollum looks very well done. You do get a quick glimpse of Treebeard grabbing the hobbits. The shots of amassed soldiers (at Isengard; on the march to Helm's Deep; before the gates of Helm's Deep, and attacking) are eye-popping. What really stokes me is what they don't show yet: Shelob; the glowing dead in the marshes; the gates into Mordor; the Rohirrim against the Orcs, etc. Someone mentioned how in the first film, scenes made reference to what would happen later. I'm glad I'm not the only one who got that. When I saw "FOTR" (five or six times), Saruman ripped down all the trees. This obviously set up the wrath of the Ents for the second film (since you can't actually film out the entire 40-page chapter "Treebeard" and all the exposition it provides). Just as Arwen's role was beefed up to help bring in the female audience (although, to be fair, the Appendixes give us some of her story...and Aragorn's; and adding her in FOTR will better explain...uh, never mind, I don't want to spoil some things). You see in the trailer a couple glimpses of Arwen and Galadriel, and also Elrond; I think adding them in the second film, although they're absent from the second book, is a way to provide continuity to the characters in a three-film series, rather than having them "go away" for two years. There is also a cool shot in the trailer of riders on the wolflike Wargs. Ah, yes, 't'will be one hell of a film.
The thing is... Its scary how much I like Tolkien. Its been ammo for my friends for as long as I can remember. But... I didn't even like the first two books that much. So if the movies translate the same way... I thought the third book was about 100 times better than the first two combined. So if roxtxia is getting wood about the previews of Two Towers, he's gonna spew at the previews for Return of the King. Just my two cents.
WARNING: SPOILER!!!!!! Shelob has been moved to the start of Return of the King. Peter Jackson said that in a recent interview, citing reasons that: a) it would have made the movie way too long. Seeing as the attack of Shelob happens quite a while after the events of book 3 (first half of TTT) b) to give Frodo and Sam more movie-time in ROTK. If Shelob was in TTT, all we would see Frodo and Sam doing would be climbing up Mount Doom. Seeing as the scouring of the shire was taken out.
This just in, hot off the press: The final cut of The Two Towers has just been made. Not sure of the length yet, but it is rated PG-13 for epic battle sequences and scary images. Funny, FOTR was rated the same, except 'some scary images' instead of 'scary images'. [Link: TheOneRing.net
that was me, when i saw it with a couple of friend wo didn't read the book, and that scene of Sarumon came, i laughed, and nobody understood it. i was affraid they would let it out of the movie. i think treebeard will look great, i love it they got John Rhys-davis to do his voice.
I understanding wanting a GoT of their own. I can't understand the decision to go with the Lord of the Rings universe. Has somebody locked up Mistborn or other Brandon Sorenson? I recall someone (maybe HBO) was going to do Wheel of Time. There's plenty of other options.
Lord of the Rings has a massive built in audience that absolutely loves the books and films and is dying for an expanded universe on screen. It also has obvious general audience appeal. If they do it well this will be a monster hit.
As a big LOTR fan, I always thought it would be cool to have a bridging movie/tv/book about what happened between The Hobbit and LOTR (looks like this will be it). In my mind, it was about Aragorn and Gandalf teaming up and killing Orcs and looking for Gollum (not sure if that actually happened, haven't read it for years). Or just introduce a bunch of new characters.
