The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King – 2003 (WINNER)
Peter Jackson has done it again. In this third installment of the amazing franchise, he knocked it out of the park and created a special effects extravaganza that, in most cases, looked absolutely photo-realistic. Of course this one took home the award for Best Visual Effects. The special effects were simply astonishing from beginning to end, and no other film really stood a chance.
A normal movie usually has about 200 effects shots, but this one had 1,488. Due to the sheer number of effects shots, and the ridiculous time constraints that the effects company, Weta Digital, had to deal with, it was inevitable that there would be some shots that didn’t work quite as well, but they were, by far, the exception, and not the rule. I can think of two examples. There was a simple shot where Legolas and Aragorn are watching the night sky in Edoras, and they look strangely separate from the sky behind them. The other is when Legolas slides down the trunk of a giant elephant he has just killed. And according the one of the documentaries included with the DVD, that second one was a very last minute addition that was hastily put together in two days. It was still pretty good, but it always catches my attention, and not in a good way.
But aside from tiny things like that, the effects were amazing. One of the scenes that the documentary focused on was the massive Battle of Pelennor Fields. They showed how the entire sequence was visually built from scratch, using both live elements and digital ones. Now, giant elephants don’t exist in the real world, so we know they were digital, even though they looked very real. But what about the hundreds of thousands of orcs and the six thousand horses and riders? Only a few of them were live actors. Most of them were digital, but don’t ask me which ones. I couldn’t tell the difference.
Even the backgrounds and the battlefield itself were created by compositing photographs of completely different places and digitally combining them to make a new environment. And this was just one example. The black gates and the land of Mordor were all fantasy environments that only exist inside a computer. The tower of Barad Dur was awesome, especially when it crumbled, fell, and finally exploded with the destruction of the Ring.
And like the first two movies in the franchise, there were amazing creature effects. This time we had an amazing army of ghosts, a giant spider that came out of someone’s worst nightmare, flying Ring Wraiths, giant eagles, and, of course, the completely digital villain Gollum. Perfection, every last one of them. Obviously, there were too many effects in the film to mention them all. There was a reason why this movie took home so many awards at the Oscars, the visual effects being one that was well-deserved.