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Comment by Aardwolf | Hacker News Reader

The LotR movies are now over 20 years old.

When I watched LotR, I was around 20 myself, and a then 20 year old movie (which would be an early 80s movie) would seem like a movie from a completely different era to me.

Today, LotR still seems somewhat fresh to me, and this article and HN comments here seem to agree given that new LotR movies from today are still being linked to this 20 year old one.

What gives? Is it just my age and similar age of the HN crowd? Or is there truly more difference between 1983 and 2003, than between 2003 and 2023?

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I am 26 and the movies still feel fresh. I didn't even get to watch the movies until I was an adult...I only had the books, so the respect the movies had for the books was very special to me.

What pisses me off about Warner Bros is how they are latching onto LotR and Harry Potter because they were glorious 20 years ago, and they want to reclaim that glory without putting any work in to make something worth watching. They would rather milk one man's life's work to death for a cheap buck instead of trying to make something new. And, its probably going to be successful. Harry potter was fun 20 years ago, LotR was fun 20 years ago, but as a society we need to move on to new works instead of latching onto past success. If Warner Bros could realize that, they would be better off for it.

> If Warner Bros could realize that, they would be better off for it.

It seems clear to me, after the whole takeover via David Zaslav, that Warner Bros is being forced into an unearned bankrupcy -- they're actively killing anything they have that is-or-was new, exciting, or fresh (even many works already created and paid for). HBO Max was one of the few optimistic brightspots in that market, and they're now hanging it out to dry (and giving that market share to Paramount in the process).

But you know, the stock market loves it, so it must be good. I look forward to seeing this new version of "The Lord of the Rings", as lovingly crafted by the folks at TLC, exclusively on Discovery Plus.

I hope any further LotR work will be willing to take more risks. The Rings of Power did not take any, and hence was stultifyingly dull.

Im still upset that they cancelled Final Space by Olan Rogers. It wasn't always the greatest comedy, but it had heart and I found it endearing.

I think that we just reached a point of diminishing returns on special effects in the early 2000s. The improvements since then have mostly been in reducing the cost to produce convincing CGI, with very little gain in the maximum quality that can be achieved.

We can push the envelope vastly farther today than in the early 2000s. The difference is movies now have so much CGI that they can’t afford to spend much time on any of it.

Consider the LOTR orc army shots. Now days we can simply simulate various AI characters walking on uneven surfaces and it looks fine. The regimented look on flat ground worked, but it was based in large part on limitations at the time and just felt off. But conversely this means the army could and therefore would show up in the background in several shots which then means more vastly more CGI is needed. Unfortunately, more seconds of CGI means less me only you can spend on each of those seconds.

It's a movie series set in an old timey fantasy world so it's not going to seem dated the way an 80s movie like The Breakfast Club or even Ghostbusters might seem dated.

That said I don't entirely buy your premise about freshness if by that you mean quality. I'd say Ghostbusters still holds up much better than the majority of modern hollywood movies even if it used a different style of film stock and different special effects.

I think it is just a ton of loving attention to detail in the sets, costumes, music and performances. Crucially for movies of that era, I think the CGI is also tastefully done and blended with the rest of the film. They didn’t go for much of the kinds of full CG scenes we see in todays Marvel movies you could make an apples to apples comparison for and see the gulf in techniques you get over a few decades, but they also didn’t use techniques like stop motion or muppets that seem aged to us when looking at 80’s films.

Purely on visuals side of things:

- Tron released in 1982: one of the first movies with extensive use of CGI

- Terminator 2 released in 1992 with first partially CGI character and realistic CGI human movement

- LOTR in 2003 had it's own important firsts like AI driven CGI characters in massive battles

There have been advances since, but not comparable to TRON to LOTR jump. Another important factor is that a lot of effects were practical and not CGI and those will always age well.

Cultural stagnation + technological advances. Home theaters and special effects haven't really improved in 20 years, at least they have not at the rate seen from 1980 to 2000.

> When I watched LotR, I was around 20 myself, and a then 20 year old movie (which would be an early 80s movie) would seem like a movie from a completely different era to me.

The first LotR movies was released in 2001. If you go back 20 years, that is 1981. Which is the year Raiders of the Lost Ark came out:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raiders_of_the_Lost_Ark

That still would have seemed fresh in 2001 (and still does now).

Plenty of other notable movies in 1981 as well:

* https://www.imdb.com/search/title/?year=1981&title_type=feat...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_American_films_of_1981

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1981_in_film

Same as with endless Spider-Man reboots.

And turning a single book (the hobbit) into a trilogy of movies.

Cash grabs.

Spider-Man is kind of a special case, though. It's pretty much an essential part of the Spider-Man universe that the main character and all his friends are teenagers, so if you're going to make new Spider-Man movies you have to start over with new actors every few years. Tobey Maguire was (IMO) the best movie Spider-Man, but he's 47 now -- it'd be hard for him to play a high school/early college student. :-)

Contrast with something like Batman, where the main character isn't any one specified age. You could probably get away with a Batman who was anything from mid-20s to mid-40s, or maybe even older.

To be fair, movies from the 80s look like movies from the 80s. Film stock has a lot to do with the visual look. But other things like the sound effects of weapons, the crappy car chases/wrecks/explosions add to just how 80s films stand out. You can tell a move from at least 2000s from the vast amount of CGI. Let's not forget about the wardrobe and hair styles. And the smoking.

LotR has to be acknowledged on how well it was produced regardless of how one feels about the treatment of the story itself.

Definitely some of the most beautiful (I blame New Zealand) movies ever made.

In general, I thought the movies were amazing in all aspects except the writing. The casting and acting were good, but the writing diminished everything else, but at least we got the "And my axe!" meme out of it.

>Definitely some of the most beautiful (I blame New Zealand) movies ever made.

I had a job that sent me to New Zealand for what turned out to be a pretty amazing time. I almost didn't come back because I liked it so much. I had no idea where all I'd be visiting on the trip, but part of the assignment took me to a lot of the locations used to in the film. One place had one of the chairs they used to help sell the forced perspective of having a normal size human look small and was a photo-op. The trip took me into the woods, up to the top of mountains walking on a glacier where the water hadn't been liquid for tens of thousands of years (or some such). Haven't lucked into a job assignment like that ever since.

Probably non-linear video editing and the ability to add somewhat believable CGI gave it much longer shelf life than what would be expected.

It doesn't seem dated because it was one of the first movies to digitally alter the color palette. 80's and 90's movies have a natural palette because they were done on film.

Modern movies have a blue/orange palette, which is full display in House of the Dragon. It's as awful as that green/red two strip Technicolor used in the 1930s.

The fact that it's sort of a period piece for a period that never existed helps. Fantasy is handy that way. Aside from the trends around color grading and film stock, much of what gives the visuals a sense of being of a specific time are choices around clothes, hair, and makeup.

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