They did

How does it look bad? I just watched it and it looks fine to me.

I'm not sure whether all practical effects age that well though, either. The Thing looks amazing, but it's also pretty obvious that you're seeing a bunch of rubber. I guess, it looks cheesy in the way it's always looked cheesy, it doesn't look cheesy the way the prequels look like an expensive video game cutscene that progressively get worse with age.

That clip isn’t a good example. Rotoscoped shadows are only briefly visible before Gollum gets up. See the early TTT scenes in Emyn Muil.

Also notice how they frame things so Gollums shadow is visible as little as possible. They knew what they had to work with.

Conventional prosthetics would have made LotR age much nicer, even if maybe Gollum hadn’t looked quite so alien.

His cartoonish appearance definitely is a distraction. Had they picked somebody who more closely resembled a human, the rest of the scene wouldn't have been overshadowed (no pun intended).

And I watched a bit of the scene from The Two Towers you mentioned, and I agree the shadow almost made me think I was watching a Disney cartoon or something for a second.

I mean without the layer of animation on top, aka:







Even the facial animations look off to me. They look.. better than most CGI, but the musculature under the face seems off to me during the dialogue and I find it annoying.

I always find exactly why hard to express because reading facial expressions is such a gut instinct.

The eyebrows at 0:26 and everything at 1:15 is a good example of the animations looking off.

The low resolution rocks he is on don't help the shadows, either.

Is it just me or are those rocks upscaled and blurred for the 1080p version?

wow

Pretty much. The letterbox versions are in a different slipcase. The special editions first DVD release was the last format I've purchased. Would have picked up the blurays if they contained decent non SE cuts but refuse to pay that kind of money for the films again.



I was on my own for awhile in '03 and I had a TV with a VCR built in that I had with me. I hooked up a DVD player to it and found out that I couldn't watch anything decent due to the copy protection coming off the DVDs. I was super annoyed. It was during that period that I completed Metroid Prime. I was super annoyed with that because I missed scanning one lousy creature in one level and that is the only thing keeping me from 100% everything on that play through.

I've found a really cool hack to improve the CGI in movies. Watch on an old CRT in standard definition. I had Rogue One going one time while I was in the garage streaming on an old Roku on a 27" CRT. Tarkin looked pretty good. I actually only keep that old TV around in case I ever feel like playing Lethal Enforcers on SNES.

I'm not sure how I feel about this one. But this is going the other direction with de-specializing, and adding effects to help with the continuity of the universe. He even went as far as making a wampa costume and filming footage of that to composite into the film. He even built miniature sets of Hoth base to add more contextual shots. In addition he also color corrected a lot of the footage to remove the weird blue tint from the bluray release.

Eh, depends. If the new shots don't distract too much and aren't visually offensive, it could be fine. It does seem superfluous.. I'm not even sure ESB has any significant continuity errors. I remember a few scenes seeming a bit weird, but the pacing fits the actions well enough it doesn't matter.

I'd maybe tolerate the blu-ray special editions if they didn't saturate the colors. Color saturation always looks like crap. 100% of the time.

Or color desaturation as in the case of Man of Steel.

Oh, and in yet another embarrassing admission, I also have the Special Editions on VHS and Episode I is the sole prequel trilogy film that I have on VHS. I probably bought it because it was a special release or something. Star Wars used to get a lot of my money.

You have more or less the same as me, only that mine are in German. Do you remember if your VHS version of the OT (not the Special Edition) contained an interview with George Lucas? I think in this one he told of his grand vision of 9 movies.

I also got the VHS version of TPM simply because the DVD came out way later. And it might even be possible that I didn't have a DVD player back then.

Yes, each tape has a portion of an interview with Leonard Maltin.

I remember watching the Leonard Maltin interviews on these tapes pre-TPM and getting so psyched about the new movies he was making. I regret nothing.

I did always wonder why this edition opened with an advertisement for...itself? Was it in case you were watching a rented copy or something?

With the exception of Return of the Jedi and the Han/Greedo scene I really didn't mind the special edition changes. Of course the problem with many of them are that he was pushing CG technology to its limits and that's a bad technology to push to its limits. And wouldn't a really simply solution to Han Solo walking behind the actor that was standing in for Jabba simply have been to cut away when he did it?

Also, yeah, they were advertising that trilogy pretty hard as the last time to own the original version of Star Wars. Funny thing is, even that wasn't the original version of Star Wars. I don't remember exactly when I saw it but the first time I saw "Episode IV A New Hope" in the title crawl I was like, "I don't remember that."

They added that for the 1981 theatrical reissue. It was only absent from the 1977 version.

I know, LOL. I'm so old.

So we watched Solo. Meh, but not in a really bad way. The Force is Female is prominent. Lots of dumb stuff but it came across as a dumb action movie and so, it all kind of worked. It's basically the dumbest Star Wars film ever, probably including Ewok movies, and it tries to be a little high-brow but it's kind of fun. Not a ringing endorsement but after the first two sequel trilogy films I wasn't too disappointed. I'll probably watch it again before my rental expires just to get a little more out of it.

Referring to Masters of Teras Kasi? No, don't do that ever. Han speaking Wookiee? No, that's just something people like me do. Don't do it in a movie. Funny? Yeah, kind of. Breaking the fourth wall? The Imperial March really is the Imperial March. Oh, spoiler alert.

Don't you know? Breaking the fourth wall is a masterful technique that only the most talented writers can achieve. It instantly deepens your work by at least half and garners praise from even the densest of morons. It requires such skill and eloquence that only Disney geniuses could pull it off.

/s

Oh hell yeah

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_iZbPh2fus#t=9m37s