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The Lord of the Rings theory appeals to me, not because I think it's right, but because those movies set much else in motion that has plagued film since. For on

The Lord of the Rings theory appeals to me, not because I think it's right, but because those movies set much else in motion that has plagued film since. For one: fight scenes. The constant cuts from close-up to close-up of the faces of those fighting did an absolutely terrible job of getting the combat across, whether the scale, the difficulty, or what was even logically happening. Many of the fight scenes in movies since have focused on the up-close, refusing to use the vast expanse of the movie screen to do what it's built to do — show large-scale action, give a sense of where this is happening in the world, and showing the characters as being a small part of that world instead of, well, giant faces grimly emoting.

jjoonathan 5y ago
Grimly emoting is cheap and easy -- convincingly animating large-scale action is difficult and expensive. LARPing it out is difficult and expensive too. I don't think it's a LoTR thing, I think it's an economics thing.
v7p1Qbt1im 5y ago
I also watched an unhealthy amount of behind-the-scenes for lotr. Peter Jackson mentioned that there is a thing called „Battle fatigue“. Battles should focus on the the main characters and their journey through a battle. Otherwise battle scenes could get boring or repetitive really quickly. Also it‘s cheaper, as someone else said.
- rconti 5y ago
  Funny that he knew this, and yet somehow the first LoTR was still 2 hours of battle scenes and 1 hour of interesting stuff happening.
  - v7p1Qbt1im 5y ago
    I never had this feeling. Especially in the first one. You basically have the Balin‘s tomb scene and Amon Hen at the end. It never felt drawn out to me.
CoastalCoder 5y ago
I think the battle scene [0] from The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe did a pretty good job of balancing up-close chaos with big-picture clarity. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FixGtngBdhE&ab_channel=EdenKassa https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FixGtngBdhE&ab_channel=EdenK...
tomxor 5y ago
This is so true, I get really bored of combat scenes these days for many reasons, this is a big one. I remember the first time I really noticed this was when trying to watch batman (can't remember which one), at an "imax" cinema, ya know, those ones where you sit very close to a huge screen designed for films that intentionally fill that extra space with peripheral vision information... But for an already annoyingly close cut series of fight scenes it made it so much worse, unwatchable, I had to just close my eyes for half of the film because it was so physically hard to look at.
adflux 5y ago
>show large-scale action There are many large panning/sweeping shots in this series, such as when the ents attack Isengard, orcs besiege Helms Deep, when the fellowship runs through Moria... Sure there are some quick cuts happening in some swordfighting scenes. And I agree it could have been better if these scenes were shot in a different format.
jl6 5y ago
I’ve always assumed it’s cheaper to have an editor quick-cut footage into fake combat than to have a choreographer create realistic combat. Also, combat in general is incredibly boring in modern films. Punch, punch, grunt, grimace - without any consequence. Maybe someone has a cut lip which is gone in the next scene. Superhero movies are the worst for this, where characters routinely throw each other through walls and none of it matters because they are as good as invincible.
- monkeynotes 5y ago
  Wider shots would require so much more CGI work. Many movies these days are simply a formula that as a middle aged person I've seen so many times I just can't watch action or superhero movies, I have zero interest. I am not the target audience though. Even movies aimed at my demographic are laden with tropes, little interesting or creative storyline. Long form TV is generally much more creative story based and does not reboot old TV so much (Bell Air is more of an exception than a rule).
  - nottorp 5y ago
    > Long form TV is generally much more creative story based Agree with the rest, but I'm afraid that i find 99.95% of the current TV series as boring as superhero movies. At least a movie finishes in (up to) 3 hours...
  - pjc50 5y ago
    Early in the pandemic my wife and I started a small virtual film club with a remit of "old, bad, B, or unheard-of films". It's been hugely entertaining, far more so than the modern repetitiveness of superhero movies. And a lot of them make great use of colour, such as the Hammer/Amicus horror movies. Those tend to do fun things with red/green lighting, side or underlighting, or splashes of light across the eyes of an otherwise in darkness character. Re: Bel Air reboot, "dark reboot of light comedy series" is such a ridiculous cliche that I can't believe they've actually done it. Very 2020s.
    - smnscu 5y ago
ghaff 5y ago
I remember listening to the DVD commentary on one of the LOTR films many years ago. One of the things that struck me was the amount of "Oh, and we changed this in post production." Obviously there are limits but CGI, color correction, etc. must lead to a degree of not worrying too much about getting it right in the camera because you can (sorta) fix things later.
jonpurdy 5y ago
There’s a great quote from Jackie Chan about fight scenes: “I never move my camera. Always steady. Wide angle.” Most action scenes in movies have moving cameras with fast cuts and zoomed in faces. Makes it impossible to actually track what’s happening. I didn’t realize this until I saw this※ YT video specifically about his action comedy style. ※ - https://youtu.be/Z1PCtIaM_GQ https://youtu.be/Z1PCtIaM_GQ
- lupire 5y ago
  Jackie Chan can do that because he has the talent to choreograph and perform fights.
  - quartesixte 5y ago
    Not to mention the will to get himself almost killed on set — along with the rest of his stunt crew.
  - fullshark 5y ago
    Now that most stunts are performed by computer generated humans instead of talented actors/stuntmen, it does seem a lot of this is to avoid the uncanny valley. The Neo v. 10k Smiths fight from Matrix Reloaded used wide angles and avoided quick cuts if I remember correctly and looked like a cartoon even when it was cutting edge in 2003. I wonder if it was tried again in 2022 the technology would have advanced enough to make it look real.
    - zepearl 5y ago
      I remember many people saying that that was a great scene, but to me it immediately looked horrible -> big mistery... . I hate that scene - the idea is great, but the quality of the <textures?> is in my opinion horrible... . Weird.
      - fullshark 5y ago
        The technology wasn't far enough along to accomplish the directors' vision imo, maybe it's there now. It was a cutting edge technological advance (I think it took a year to render or something) just like Jar Jar Binks and the CGI backgrounds in Episode I, but because it was cutting edge mistakes were made in implementing it. The weird colors affecting films and quick cuts I think are just tricks used now to make it work given so much of modern film involves blending live action and CGI.
acdha 5y ago
I’d also attribute some of this to the superhero glut: they’re generally not very good plots stretched out to many hours and the combat is supposed to be a big draw but since they’ve removed the limits of realism (the audience usually knows who’s going to win, and that the writers can always cancel out the consequences in the next episode either way) there isn’t much left but posturing iconically and visual effects.
- gcanyon 5y ago
  > the audience usually knows who’s going to win I just watched The Eternals, and spoiler: they’re not all eternal. It added an excellent real sense of risk to the film.
  - acdha 5y ago
    Oh, yeah, that’s why I said usually. It’s just that when you remove the usual constraints on what people can do, how much damage they can handle (“plot armor”), and set the precedent that almost anything can be changed retroactively as desired for the next movie, the writers have a lot less to keep the audience’s interest with.
    - gcanyon 5y ago
      Absolutely agreed. I read an article years back that criticized superhero films where the stakes are world-ending, or similarly large-scale, because that actually lowers the stakes, since you know the world isn’t ending. With smaller stakes, it’s actually possible for the protagonist to lose, at least in some ways.
      - acdha 5y ago
        That’s much more succinctly expressed
  - udbhavs 5y ago
    The Eternals is also fantastic for not using slow motion at all for the speedster. Although she doesn't have a lot of screen time, the little action that is there feels great.
jcranberry 5y ago
I don't think all movies do up-close quick-cut camera shots during fights. I'm fairly certain the reasons they do that are not because it's trendy, but because of other constraints. Things like a lack of actor training, time for practice or reshoots, or good choreography in general. It's what they can use to get away with these things.
jccalhoun 5y ago
I think this was a thing for a while before Lord of the Rings. I remember talking about it in grad school in 1999. I think it is a combination of things: digital editing makes it easy to have a million edits compared to when they used to do edits on actual film, and by cutting a lot they can put in the actor's face more.
- oneoff786 5y ago
  Agreed. This has always been a weakness of mainstream western films. Filming fights is hard, especially if actors don’t know how to fight. LoTR doesn’t seem noteworthy in this respect.
parenthesis 5y ago
Your comment is making me want to watch a bunch of old movies with the opposite. For example, Errol Flynn and Basil Rathbone sword fight: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=liZD1qScUYA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=liZD1qScUYA
- js2 5y ago
  They Live alley fight: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dgyue1tT-uE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dgyue1tT-uE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vlTPIYTd32Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vlTPIYTd32Q Star Wars epic light saber battle: https://vimeo.com/7051676 https://vimeo.com/7051676
dekhn 5y ago
LoTR for some reason has a "make the detail hard to see with fast camera motion" problem. I just watched the latest episode of Boba Fett and it had a great fight and a great chase scene. It's like everything was slowed down and you could see the details.
- titusjohnson 5y ago
  I was just thinking that the Boba Felt chase scene was too slow. I could practically 'feel' the weight of the mopeds, and some of the movement made it obvious these were wheeled devices with CG trickery applied after. The general speed of the chase made me feel like I was watching Mitchel. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BOCqlKNW9rU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BOCqlKNW9rU
  - dekhn 5y ago
    Are you 100% certain the mopeds were wheeled? I think these days it's also possible to just have a moped on a rotating stilt in front of a blue screen, and that's a lot easier for interior shooting/stunts.
    - titusjohnson 5y ago
      That certainly might have been it too, but if they're going that direction I would have expected everything to just feel more weightless/frictionless.
      - dekhn 5y ago
        I think this is a core part of the aesthetic of Star Wars as originally created by Lucas. In particular, those characters were amalgams of 50s greasers, 70s punks and 80s mods. If you haven't seen American Grafitti, it's worth watching as a reference, but basically, they're going for landspeeder physics and landspeeders kind of hover a constant distance over the ground.
kevinventullo 5y ago
I always though Gladiator was what really kicked this off.
kodisha 5y ago
Transformers movies took that to a very extreme, where every fight scene is just a constant motion blur (zoomed).
SavantIdiot 5y ago
Totally. My issue with the LoTR fight scenes is that they don't look natural. The lighting is all off because they want to show everyone's face all the time. It ended up feeling very ... flat. (Putting aside the constant banter of Legolas/Gimli keeping score that made it seem like a joke, and every monster having to scream into the camera that also made if feel corny.)
jfengel 5y ago
I recall seeing that hyperkinetic cutting in Gladiator a few years before Lord of the Rings. I didn't like it then, either. It conveys the feeling of confusion in a battle, which is realistic, but I don't find it a very interesting feeling. I'd much rather see something with stakes. It doesn't even have to be that large-scale. Two actors hitting each other -- showing their whole bodies, for at least a few seconds between cuts -- gives me a chance to sense how they feel each other out, what risks they're taking, how a blow actually hurts and has consequences. If the only emotion I'm getting is "confused", then I'm just marking time until somebody tells me who won and who lost.
Angostura 5y ago
? The one thing I loved about the films was the sweeping grandeur of many of its shots, including the battle scenes.
majormajor 5y ago
You can take this back to at least Saving Private Ryan or even Star Wars, right? I remember more close-ups of the beach scene in SPR vs an "overall" zoom-out. And similarly, in ROTJ, there was a giant space battle around the Death Star, that we saw from the perspective of just a few ships. I don't think showing the grand scale - with tiny pawns moving around in different parts - would be very visually or narratively interesting, unless I'm misunderstanding you.
aidenn0 5y ago
I think Saving Private Ryan is an early example of close-ups and jump-cuts in a battle; particularly the opening sequence, where it could get away with it because it's assumed that the audience already knows the story of the Normandy landing "in the large" so showing it "in the small" was an effective story-telling tool to move the audience away from "famous historical battle" to "oh shit all my friends just had their limbs blown off"

jjoonathan 5y ago

Grimly emoting is cheap and easy -- convincingly animating large-scale action is difficult and expensive. LARPing it out is difficult and expensive too. I don't think it's a LoTR thing, I think it's an economics thing.

v7p1Qbt1im 5y ago

I also watched an unhealthy amount of behind-the-scenes for lotr. Peter Jackson mentioned that there is a thing called „Battle fatigue“. Battles should focus on the the main characters and their journey through a battle. Otherwise battle scenes could get boring or repetitive really quickly. Also it‘s cheaper, as someone else said.

rconti 5y ago
Funny that he knew this, and yet somehow the first LoTR was still 2 hours of battle scenes and 1 hour of interesting stuff happening.
- v7p1Qbt1im 5y ago
  I never had this feeling. Especially in the first one. You basically have the Balin‘s tomb scene and Amon Hen at the end. It never felt drawn out to me.

CoastalCoder 5y ago

I think the battle scene [0] from The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe did a pretty good job of balancing up-close chaos with big-picture clarity. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FixGtngBdhE&ab_channel=EdenKassa https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FixGtngBdhE&ab_channel=EdenK...

tomxor 5y ago

This is so true, I get really bored of combat scenes these days for many reasons, this is a big one. I remember the first time I really noticed this was when trying to watch batman (can't remember which one), at an "imax" cinema, ya know, those ones where you sit very close to a huge screen designed for films that intentionally fill that extra space with peripheral vision information... But for an already annoyingly close cut series of fight scenes it made it so much worse, unwatchable, I had to just close my eyes for half of the film because it was so physically hard to look at.

adflux 5y ago

>show large-scale action There are many large panning/sweeping shots in this series, such as when the ents attack Isengard, orcs besiege Helms Deep, when the fellowship runs through Moria... Sure there are some quick cuts happening in some swordfighting scenes. And I agree it could have been better if these scenes were shot in a different format.

jl6 5y ago

I’ve always assumed it’s cheaper to have an editor quick-cut footage into fake combat than to have a choreographer create realistic combat. Also, combat in general is incredibly boring in modern films. Punch, punch, grunt, grimace - without any consequence. Maybe someone has a cut lip which is gone in the next scene. Superhero movies are the worst for this, where characters routinely throw each other through walls and none of it matters because they are as good as invincible.

monkeynotes 5y ago
Wider shots would require so much more CGI work. Many movies these days are simply a formula that as a middle aged person I've seen so many times I just can't watch action or superhero movies, I have zero interest. I am not the target audience though. Even movies aimed at my demographic are laden with tropes, little interesting or creative storyline. Long form TV is generally much more creative story based and does not reboot old TV so much (Bell Air is more of an exception than a rule).
- nottorp 5y ago
  > Long form TV is generally much more creative story based Agree with the rest, but I'm afraid that i find 99.95% of the current TV series as boring as superhero movies. At least a movie finishes in (up to) 3 hours...
- pjc50 5y ago
  Early in the pandemic my wife and I started a small virtual film club with a remit of "old, bad, B, or unheard-of films". It's been hugely entertaining, far more so than the modern repetitiveness of superhero movies. And a lot of them make great use of colour, such as the Hammer/Amicus horror movies. Those tend to do fun things with red/green lighting, side or underlighting, or splashes of light across the eyes of an otherwise in darkness character. Re: Bel Air reboot, "dark reboot of light comedy series" is such a ridiculous cliche that I can't believe they've actually done it. Very 2020s.
  - smnscu 5y ago

ghaff 5y ago

I remember listening to the DVD commentary on one of the LOTR films many years ago. One of the things that struck me was the amount of "Oh, and we changed this in post production." Obviously there are limits but CGI, color correction, etc. must lead to a degree of not worrying too much about getting it right in the camera because you can (sorta) fix things later.

jonpurdy 5y ago

There’s a great quote from Jackie Chan about fight scenes: “I never move my camera. Always steady. Wide angle.” Most action scenes in movies have moving cameras with fast cuts and zoomed in faces. Makes it impossible to actually track what’s happening. I didn’t realize this until I saw this※ YT video specifically about his action comedy style. ※ - https://youtu.be/Z1PCtIaM_GQ https://youtu.be/Z1PCtIaM_GQ

lupire 5y ago
Jackie Chan can do that because he has the talent to choreograph and perform fights.
- quartesixte 5y ago
  Not to mention the will to get himself almost killed on set — along with the rest of his stunt crew.
- fullshark 5y ago
  Now that most stunts are performed by computer generated humans instead of talented actors/stuntmen, it does seem a lot of this is to avoid the uncanny valley. The Neo v. 10k Smiths fight from Matrix Reloaded used wide angles and avoided quick cuts if I remember correctly and looked like a cartoon even when it was cutting edge in 2003. I wonder if it was tried again in 2022 the technology would have advanced enough to make it look real.
  - zepearl 5y ago
    I remember many people saying that that was a great scene, but to me it immediately looked horrible -> big mistery... . I hate that scene - the idea is great, but the quality of the <textures?> is in my opinion horrible... . Weird.
    - fullshark 5y ago
      The technology wasn't far enough along to accomplish the directors' vision imo, maybe it's there now. It was a cutting edge technological advance (I think it took a year to render or something) just like Jar Jar Binks and the CGI backgrounds in Episode I, but because it was cutting edge mistakes were made in implementing it. The weird colors affecting films and quick cuts I think are just tricks used now to make it work given so much of modern film involves blending live action and CGI.

acdha 5y ago

I’d also attribute some of this to the superhero glut: they’re generally not very good plots stretched out to many hours and the combat is supposed to be a big draw but since they’ve removed the limits of realism (the audience usually knows who’s going to win, and that the writers can always cancel out the consequences in the next episode either way) there isn’t much left but posturing iconically and visual effects.

gcanyon 5y ago
> the audience usually knows who’s going to win I just watched The Eternals, and spoiler: they’re not all eternal. It added an excellent real sense of risk to the film.
- acdha 5y ago
  Oh, yeah, that’s why I said usually. It’s just that when you remove the usual constraints on what people can do, how much damage they can handle (“plot armor”), and set the precedent that almost anything can be changed retroactively as desired for the next movie, the writers have a lot less to keep the audience’s interest with.
  - gcanyon 5y ago
    Absolutely agreed. I read an article years back that criticized superhero films where the stakes are world-ending, or similarly large-scale, because that actually lowers the stakes, since you know the world isn’t ending. With smaller stakes, it’s actually possible for the protagonist to lose, at least in some ways.
    - acdha 5y ago
      That’s much more succinctly expressed
- udbhavs 5y ago
  The Eternals is also fantastic for not using slow motion at all for the speedster. Although she doesn't have a lot of screen time, the little action that is there feels great.

jcranberry 5y ago

I don't think all movies do up-close quick-cut camera shots during fights. I'm fairly certain the reasons they do that are not because it's trendy, but because of other constraints. Things like a lack of actor training, time for practice or reshoots, or good choreography in general. It's what they can use to get away with these things.

jccalhoun 5y ago

I think this was a thing for a while before Lord of the Rings. I remember talking about it in grad school in 1999. I think it is a combination of things: digital editing makes it easy to have a million edits compared to when they used to do edits on actual film, and by cutting a lot they can put in the actor's face more.

oneoff786 5y ago
Agreed. This has always been a weakness of mainstream western films. Filming fights is hard, especially if actors don’t know how to fight. LoTR doesn’t seem noteworthy in this respect.

parenthesis 5y ago

Your comment is making me want to watch a bunch of old movies with the opposite. For example, Errol Flynn and Basil Rathbone sword fight: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=liZD1qScUYA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=liZD1qScUYA

js2 5y ago
They Live alley fight: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dgyue1tT-uE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dgyue1tT-uE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vlTPIYTd32Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vlTPIYTd32Q Star Wars epic light saber battle: https://vimeo.com/7051676 https://vimeo.com/7051676

dekhn 5y ago

LoTR for some reason has a "make the detail hard to see with fast camera motion" problem. I just watched the latest episode of Boba Fett and it had a great fight and a great chase scene. It's like everything was slowed down and you could see the details.

titusjohnson 5y ago
I was just thinking that the Boba Felt chase scene was too slow. I could practically 'feel' the weight of the mopeds, and some of the movement made it obvious these were wheeled devices with CG trickery applied after. The general speed of the chase made me feel like I was watching Mitchel. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BOCqlKNW9rU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BOCqlKNW9rU
- dekhn 5y ago
  Are you 100% certain the mopeds were wheeled? I think these days it's also possible to just have a moped on a rotating stilt in front of a blue screen, and that's a lot easier for interior shooting/stunts.
  - titusjohnson 5y ago
    That certainly might have been it too, but if they're going that direction I would have expected everything to just feel more weightless/frictionless.
    - dekhn 5y ago
      I think this is a core part of the aesthetic of Star Wars as originally created by Lucas. In particular, those characters were amalgams of 50s greasers, 70s punks and 80s mods. If you haven't seen American Grafitti, it's worth watching as a reference, but basically, they're going for landspeeder physics and landspeeders kind of hover a constant distance over the ground.

kevinventullo 5y ago

I always though Gladiator was what really kicked this off.

kodisha 5y ago

Transformers movies took that to a very extreme, where every fight scene is just a constant motion blur (zoomed).

SavantIdiot 5y ago

Totally. My issue with the LoTR fight scenes is that they don't look natural. The lighting is all off because they want to show everyone's face all the time. It ended up feeling very ... flat. (Putting aside the constant banter of Legolas/Gimli keeping score that made it seem like a joke, and every monster having to scream into the camera that also made if feel corny.)

jfengel 5y ago

I recall seeing that hyperkinetic cutting in Gladiator a few years before Lord of the Rings. I didn't like it then, either. It conveys the feeling of confusion in a battle, which is realistic, but I don't find it a very interesting feeling. I'd much rather see something with stakes. It doesn't even have to be that large-scale. Two actors hitting each other -- showing their whole bodies, for at least a few seconds between cuts -- gives me a chance to sense how they feel each other out, what risks they're taking, how a blow actually hurts and has consequences. If the only emotion I'm getting is "confused", then I'm just marking time until somebody tells me who won and who lost.

Angostura 5y ago

? The one thing I loved about the films was the sweeping grandeur of many of its shots, including the battle scenes.

majormajor 5y ago

You can take this back to at least Saving Private Ryan or even Star Wars, right? I remember more close-ups of the beach scene in SPR vs an "overall" zoom-out. And similarly, in ROTJ, there was a giant space battle around the Death Star, that we saw from the perspective of just a few ships. I don't think showing the grand scale - with tiny pawns moving around in different parts - would be very visually or narratively interesting, unless I'm misunderstanding you.

aidenn0 5y ago

I think Saving Private Ryan is an early example of close-ups and jump-cuts in a battle; particularly the opening sequence, where it could get away with it because it's assumed that the audience already knows the story of the Normandy landing "in the large" so showing it "in the small" was an effective story-telling tool to move the audience away from "famous historical battle" to "oh shit all my friends just had their limbs blown off"