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Eowyn (Miranda Otto) at the Rohan capital of Edoras.
the lord of the rings:
the two towers
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Anyone familiar with the pressbooks that film companies send out to brief the media on their upcoming releases, will know that, when you get to the numbers - how many tons of steel, thousands of extras or zillions of special-effects pixels went into making this or that movie - they have run out of interesting things to say about the film.
But not always: when the producers of The Lord of the Rings do this, the numbers are so astonishing that they add to the already formidable mythology that has built up around the film. A year-and-a-half in production; 26,000 extras; 2,400 crew members; specially developed software that can give each of the 10,000 digitally generated Uruk-hai warriors the ability to respond individually and even take their own decisions… These are the kinds of things you don’t find in your average movie, or even your out-of-the-average tentpole blockbuster. They are, quite frankly, unique.
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CHRISTMAS WILL SEE THE RELEASE
OF PART TWO OF PETER JACKSON’S EPIC LORD OF THE RINGS. BUT,
SAYS NICK RODDICK, THE
APPEAL OF THE TWO TOWERS
HAS TO DO WITH A LOT MORE
THAN JUST THE SCALE
OF THE UNDERTAKING.
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But they do not, in themselves, account for the success of the franchise. That comes from the epic nature of the achievement.
Frodo (Elijah Wood) and 'Sting' |
If what director Peter Jackson had come up with, when Part One of the LOTR trilogy, The Fellowship of the Ring, New Line opened just before Christmas 2001, had been merely impressive, the movies would have gone down in film history as a marathon achievement, a bit like those wide-screen extravaganzas of the fifties, where several directors, a handful of stars and a cast of thousands combined to tell a slice of American history. He didn’t: he produced a true epic.
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