Frodo v's Elijah

[Mister Underhill]

Originally Posted by Child of the 7th Age

I only know I found the constant eye rolling and falling to the ground both melodramatic and overly simplistic, lacking the subtlety that I saw in Frodo in the book scenes.

I was watching some of the "Designing and Building Middle-earth" featurettes on Disc 3 of the RotK EE today. Three anecdotes really pointed up certain elements of Peter Jackson's sensibility.

The first was about Gothmog, the deformed Orc commander who leads the attacks on Osgiliath and Minas Tirith. Jackson had decided he wanted to go really extreme with the look of this character, citing John Merrick ("The Elephant Man") as a point of inspiration. When he came to look at what the artists had come up with, he deemed it too underdone and started enthusiastically slapping more clay onto the model. He went off to a meeting, and the artist added even more clay, saying that he just wanted to get to a point where Jackson would say that it was too much and to start pulling back. But when Jackson saw the model again, he said, "That's about right."

The second story is about the flail the Witch-king uses in his battle with Éowyn. Jackson kept sending back versions of the weapon, asking for it to be made bigger, until finally Richard Taylor, the WETA guru, had one so big that he was embarrassed to bring it on set because it looked so ridiculous. Jackson's reaction: he thought it was still about 50% too small.

The last story is about the Mouth of Sauron. Jackson, dissatisfied with the effect of the Mouth, finally decided to digitally enlarge what the makeup artists had done with the mouth of the Mouth by 200%. On the documentary, Jackson pronounces, "I like it. It's one of those slightly subtle but sort of disturbing effects."

I thought, "Subtle?! This is what PJ thinks is subtle?"

With Jackson, it's always bigger, broader, scarier, more obvious, more jeopardy, more reversals, more thrills, more, bigger, bigger! This over-the-top sensibility serves him in many ways, particularly in the action and battle sequences, but I think it really hamstrings him when it comes to building characterizations and relationships. Like his effects, Jackson seems to like his characters, from both a writing and a directing standpoint, to be bigger, bigger, 200% BIGGER!