ROTK - Ultimate Best Film winner

[Morthoron]

Originally Posted by Kitanna

I wonder what other director/creators could have done to enhance/change what PJ did. CGI is great and all, but I wonder what would have been done if someone like Jim Henson had tackled the project before his death. Snuffleupagus has a Mumakil anyone?

Or even how would LOTR been enhanced if scenese like the Barrow Wights had been included? I wasn't extremely impressed with the look of the King of the Dead, so I wonder what the wights would have turned out.

I remember a discussion by the special effects group somewhere in the Extended Edition of RotK that they were rushing to finish their version of the King of the Dead because the production of the Pirates of the Caribbean were working concurrently on the look of Barbarossa and the dead pirates. If you compare the ghastly features of Barbarossa and the King of the Dead, they are virtually kissing cousins -- although I suppose that is a gross analogy.

I am not altogether sure that Jackson has left some great legacy for future directors. WETA technology is certainly evident in other films, of course, and CGI has proliferated to the point where there is almost nothing left of humanity in films like 300 or Beowulf. I don't necessarily view that as a good thing, however. The films Jackson made prior to the Lord of the Rings are Saturday matinee fair, good for the genre they are in but not great, and I would suggest that King Kong was nowhere near the achivement of the original film, nor did it add anything important to that film's legacy. I rented Jackson's King Kong once and was irritated I wasted the four bucks.

Recently, the deplorable site EW issued its top 25 active directors, found here...

http://www.ew.com/ew/gallery/0,,20259843,00.html

Both Jackson and Guillermo Del Toro were on the list. Good for them, I guess, but the list is suspect, and many of the choices are laughable, particularly since such great 'active' directors as Milos Foreman (One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Amadeus, People vs Larry Flynt), Roman Polanski (Rosemary's Baby, The Pianist, Chinatown), Francis Ford Coppolla (The Godfather Trilogy, The Conversation, Apocalypse Now), and Jonathan Demme (Melvin and Howard, Silence of the Lambs, Philadelphia) are not included. Yet they applaud the guy who made Elf and Iron Man as more significant than the directors I just mentioned? Whatever.