Goblin king dude
orange and blue fakeness
Finally, at long last, my journey ended with poor Bilbo Baggins coming to terms with the fact that his journey had only just begun. I empathized with the poor hobbit but not nearly enough to see him through another six hours. Nothing The Desolation of Smaug had to offer me could possibly top the hilarious behind-the-scenes video of Benedict Cumberbatch mo-capping it, anyway.
What most struck me during my rewatch of the 2012 film is that, despite the initial press and public backlash about its visuals, its shitty look has become almost the modern standard for CGI, rather than an embarrassing footnote on the road to better things. A quick google pointed me in the direction of a possible culprit.
Weta Digital, the New Zealand-based digital effects company founded in part by Peter Jackson in 1993, became an overnight industry titan thanks to Jackson’s Lord of the Rings three-picture deal. Beyond netting an Oscar for each film of the trilogy—chiefly for groundbreaking motion-capture technology first showcased in The Fellowship of the Ring’s Gollum scenes—this attention brought scores of new clients to the Weta offices. The little studio had to expand fast to field all the new work.
Somewhere along the way, however, Weta seems to have lost its way and began to turn in the plastic, ugly models that I hate and see in every film with CGI, Weta’s or not. Only when working with their golden boy Andy Serkis, like in Rise of the Planet of the Apes, which carried the torch from those original Gollum scenes, do they seem to escape these stylistic pitfalls.
I’m going to need to see some signs of progress soon because The Hobbit looked bad enough that there’s no way I’m strapping in for four more Avatars without some serious reassurances.
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