The movies hold up well because of that approach, too. The Lord of the Rings series carries its award-winning prestige because of this old-fashioned approach: Only make with computers what we can’t possibly create in real life. Helm’s Deep didn’t capture the biggest visual effect of its time, but it probably captured more actual stuff than 99 percent of movies had before or since. They found spectacle in sheer numbers rather than digital wizardry. But Rings, under director Peter Jackson, zigged when everyone else zagged. Back in 1999, The Matrix had blown everybody’s minds with its computerized visual effects, and what followed was a sort of digital arms race to see who could put the most realistic-looking-but-actually-fake whatever into their movie.
The precision and sophistication of the Helm’s Deep operation, and the Rings trilogy as a whole, brought an emphasis to practical effects that Hollywood was sort of phasing out. It’s a far cry from what most studios were doing at the time, and bafflingly, it would be a far cry from what studios would do in the future (more on that later). To film a war, the Two Towers crew pretty much created one. When the crew had to record the battle cries of all those real people, they did their audio sessions in stadiums. Those people are almost all real stand-ins, by the way, a long shot from today’s shortcut computer-generated armies.
#LORD OF THE RINGS CASTLES NAMES MOVIE#
Much of the rain you see in the movie is natural, and when it’s not, it’s man-made, with thousands of gallons of water being dumped atop the thousands and thousands of on-screen characters. For one, 75 percent of the shooting was done at night, often amid nonsensical weather. It can be argued, even, that Helm’s Deep is actually underrated in its achievement. The battle’s technical mastery, sweeping spectacle and tonal balance double as the legacy for the series itself. Really, the greatness of Helm’s Deep reflects the greatness of the Lord of the Rings trilogy as a whole. Its scale is off the charts, its emotion is legitimate, and the dual mechanics of its showmanship and storytelling never clash. Helm’s Deep is heralded as one of the greatest battles ever put into a movie.