I don’t have any hardware that supports 4k so I’ll expect to be be happy with my BRs for the foreseeable future, but I recently happened to see a trailer for one the 4k versions and it looked like somebody had installed ReShade on top of Middle Earth.
Then I saw this video with Peter Jackson explaining how he felt that the LOTR trilogy felt visually inconsistent with the Hobbit movies due to differences in filmmaking technology which gave me immense George Lucas vibes.
I’d always thought the somewhat desaturated look gave the LOTR movies a somber and stark quality that fit the tone, but I guess that was a flaw that needed to be fixed. Now LOTR looks as weirdly overly saturated as the Hobbit trilogy, yay! Okay, it doesn’t look quite as bad, but I expect this is primarily how these movies will be seen in the future.
It probably would’ve looked and felt very different and I can imagine some fanboys getting mad about it
it should have never been expected to be the same as a different film series from 15 years before. orlando bloom had no business there either
“A Legolas cameo, that’s kind of cool”
“Oh, I guess he’s in every scene in Mirkwood. Well, he’s from there so it makes sense I suppose”
“Why is the barrel scene now a giant battle sequence with orcs and why are Legolas and this new elf character there and now they’re also in Laketown where there’s more battles against orcs and-” :deeper-sadness:
I don’t know if that’s such a bad thing, I mean Tolkien fanboys are still amped about 70s rotoscoped balrogs. I think having a different look to the Hobbit would have been a better move than slavishly aping of the LotR without any of the practical effects or preproduction work that made those movies look so good.
Jacksonvision™ is the defining look of this property now and we have no one to blame but faceless New Line execs and another director who doesn’t know how to say no.
