Downloads and Dragons: Look what they've done to Fantasy, ma - Page 4
© Michael Martinez
It appears "Dungeons and Dragons" will also have its gritty moments. If the movie has a weak spot, the gritty, "realistic" locations and sets could be its downfall. "Krull" filmed a lot of stuff outdoors and it looked cheap. "The Wizard of Oz" filmed everything on a soundstage and it looked great. Errol Flynn's "The Adventures of Robin Hood" used a mixture of soundstages and locations which worked very well. So there is definitely something to be said for filming movies in the local giant oak forest, if there happens to be one. Ruins, on the other hand, ruin a movie's look and feel.
Real ruins don't belong in fantasy. Not unless the fantasy is trying to look like a Three Musketeers movie. Why? Because fantasy architecture looks best when it doesn't look real. Don't ask me for a better explanation than that. All you have to do is look at the ruins in, say, "The Dark Crystal" and "Planet of the Apes" (the Charlton Heston version) to see what I mean. The creative control over constructed sets, whether outdoors or on soundstages, gives a director a much better look and feel in the film. Look at how the giant spider in "The Wild, Wild West" walks through a small mining town. Is it obvious that town is a mixture of a life-size set, a 1/4 scale set, and CGI? No.
Models and fake scenery bring a certain magic to film-making that real 13th century ruins just don't evoke. If they ever had any magic, it's gone or cannot be captured on film. About the closest I can think of for an inspiring location shot set amid ruins would be the scene in "The Quiet Man" where John Wayne and Maureen O'Hara take refuge in a ruinous old church. But the entire movie was set in contemporary Ireland, and the ruins belonged to contemporary Ireland. Even the shots of Petra in "Indiana Jones and the Lost Crusade" don't work for me because, well, everyone who knows about Petra knows it's Petra.
So even though "Dungeons and Dragons" is raising the bar on fantasy film-making, it should reassure Tolkien fans to remember that nearly everything in Peter Jackson's movies has been built. Yes, there are a lot of location shots, and they use a few existing structures, but so far we've seen meticulous attention paid to details about site design and construction.
What might hurt the films would be a reliance upon contemporary dialogue, a search for the cliched pseudo-realism that hurts so many modern fantasy films. The younger hobbits speak in a very contemporary (for the 1930s and 1940s) English in the literary story, but the purpose of using that dialogue was to give them a colloquial, even colonial feel. The people from Minas Tirith spoke the Kings' Westron, and they sounded like it. A lot of people believe actors would stumble over those lines if they really tried to deliver them as written, or just look and sound goofy. Maybe, maybe not. Tolkien recorded parts of The Lord of the Rings to see how it would sound, and he did very well with the dialogue.
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