Humanity versus Technology

Tolkien's world is as dangerous and compelling as the One Ring itself. Few stories have the trilogy's inexplicable ability to transcend its pages, and its legions of near-cultist fans prove it.

Mess with the trilogy and you're playing with fire. As always, when adapting a popular story to film, there's the risk of alienating fans. At its worst, adaptation is the large-scale homogenization of imagination. Yet film also has the ability to purify words with pictures by separating the essence of a story from the descriptive narrative that weighs it down. In this respect, the wordy trilogy is well suited to the big screen. With today's technology, special effects and digital animation have the potential to fill in the details and create fantasy on a scale defying the limits of the imagination. The real challenge, though, lies in balancing technology with humanity--this is what makes the difference between the magic of Peter Jackson's trilogy and the spectacular failure of other special-effects extravaganzas.

Remember the blurry, indistinct Coliseum crowds in Gladiator? Look carefully at the battle scenes in Two Towers --no two Orcs are alike. A program called Orc Builder was used to make each creature unique and visually distinct. Another program created especially for the movie, called Massive, mimics animal behavior by equipping each Orc with rudimentary intelligence, giving him the ability to process cues from the environment and from other characters. The battle for Helm's Deep is stunningly intricate--while each side pursues an obvious goal, the individual characters are simultaneously engaged in unpredictable hand-to-hand combat. This never could have been achieved by animating each character individually. The sheer scale of highly organized chaos is what makes the battle so terrifyingly realistic.

Even more incredibly, there are whispers of Oscardom in the making for Gollum--that's right, the little animated guy who looks like E.T. on crack. Think back to Star Wars: Episode I when CGI characters were first introduced. Remember Jar-Jar? Yeah, yousa sucked.

Peter Jackson's challenge with Gollum was to make a digital creature both distinctly inhuman and yet distinctly alive; a sort of digitalized human hybrid. Gollum's role is played by British actor Andy Serkis, and with the help of strategically placed sensors and multiple filming angles, Serkis' every movement and facial expression is painstakingly reproduced with pixels onscreen, giving him the human subtleties of expression that make his emotion authentic.

An appraisal of a CGI character depends on the extent to which we can recognize these unconscious yet distinctly human characteristics in its behavior: being 'alive' as opposed to 'animated.' Thus, whereas Jar-Jar's facial expressions create emotion, Gollum's reflect emotion. Rather than being a fancy digital puppet, he has an identity and a consciousness all his own. Jackson's ability to infuse technology with humanity--to overcome the duality between man and machine that cheapens the potential of special effects--is the secret to his trilogy's success.