The Lord of the Rings film trilogy is known for a lot of great visual effects:
- Gollum. He is a completely digital character that fits well within the environment.
- The Eye of Sauron. It is so lifelike, terrifying and realistic.
- The Mouth of Sauron. His mouth is deranged, creepy and odd. It's a shame he only appeared in the Extended Edition.
- The Balrog. Its fire is amazing and lifelike.
- Basically the Star Wars for this generation, shattering the boundaries of visual effects. Technology used for many of the film's effects was invented specifically for the movie, such as the Balrog's flaming skin, and the unforgettable stampede of a hundred Oliphaunts. From that first scene of 'The Fellowship Of The Ring' where thousands of elves and men and ungodly creatures are blackening the sky with arrows and you immediately know the films are going to be amazing, to the first shots of Hobbiton, to Rivendell, to all that suspense leading up to the onslaught of Orcs in Moria and then they get there and they're f*** ing horrible, to the troll and Balrog to Lothlórien to Gollum changing everything and calling for demands that a CGI character get an Oscar nomination, to Helm's Deep to the Pelennor Fields to the entire rest of the trilogy. True magic.
- What's all the more impressive, is in the knowledge that whenever possible, everything that appears on film actually exists in one form or another and was seamlessly put together for the finished product. This includes just about every static/scenery piece in all three movies, regardless of scale. Truly a new standard in model making/filming.
- Most of the horses in the epic battle sequences were CGI. Even professional equestrians have difficulty telling them apart from real horses.
- LotR wasn't just crowning-level awesome for how good the effects looked, but how they also acted. The Programmers didn't want to script the battles by hand, so they programmed all of the CGI characters to go nuts and try to kill each other. At one point in filming, the human armies started running away from the Orcish armies because they didn't know how to deal with the incoming oliphaunt riders!
- While just about every scene has multiple examples of this trope, the one that comes immediately to mind is the scene in The Two Towers where Saruman's spell on King Théoden is broken and he turns back to his former self.
- For all the glory that was the CGI involved, the behind the scenes show just how breathtaking practical effects can be; upwards of 90% of the shots showing folks of varying heights (mostly Gandalf and Frodo) interacting with each other was done through old-school trickery like forced perspective, creative props, etc. As just ONE example, Frodo and Gandalf aren't riding side by side, that carriage top was basically split in half and separated by a good 6 feet with the camera lined up so perfectly you couldn't see the seam, even if you weren't busy trying to find the (nonexistent) green screen and CGI artifacts.
- Meta: All 3 movies had such great visual effects that they got an Oscar win for the visual effects category.
- Meta: The fact that the visual effects still hold up today, nearly 20 years later.
