Behind Lord Of The Rings
The tagline proclaimed that all the secrets of the production of Lord of the Rings were to be revealed in its exhibition in the London Science Museum. With high expectations, I entered a room full of costumes, atmospheric music, but other than that a disappointing lack of detail or explanation of many aspects of the film trilogy that demand a complex description.
Walking from costume to costume, reading the underwhelming facts about how the Weta workshop responsible for the film’s effects had to use scale models or animatronics, and how many thousand litres of water were used in the Isengard dam scene (six), I got the sense this wasn’t an exhibition at all. Instead, the impressive array of costumes, models and weapons amounted to a promotional show, unlikely to reveal anything of any worth lest it damaged any prospect of buying a DVD or book that did go into more detail.
There were, however, some redeeming aspects of the so-called exhibition that were genuinely engaging. The descriptions of how the production team handled the problems of scale between Hobbits and men were no less than ingenious. Besides the obvious idea of using a split screen (which for three pounds you could experience yourself), there was also something called the ‘slave base’ device. When witnessing how this worked, I almost thought I had got my money’s worth. Using segments of the set, built in both hobbit and human scale that tracked the camera precisely, the shot could give the impression that Elijah Wood was actually tiny with no use of CGI at all.
Whetting the appetite with that tiny piece of information made me even less impressed with some of the exhibition’s simpler parts. Taking a huge middle section of the floor was a dark column that housed only one thing: an imitation ring suspended in a Perspex cylinder, with soundbites of various characters playing in the background. Such a banal attempt to create some atmosphere in this tiny exhibition room would not appeal to those who have visited to serve their curiosity.
Yet, there were elements of the show that were entertaining, if not informative. The Uruk Hai make up video, in which an overnight team work for hours on a sleeping actor was pretty funny, and I could not help feeling awed by how much work was poured into scenes that lasted only a few minutes. In fact, there was a feeling of too much detail in some areas, when I was confronted with a statue of an anatomically correct troll. If only the exhibition had given that much attention to the rest of the film as well as a monster’s warty genitals, it could have been a lot better.
The unforgivable omission from this show, however, was Gollum. There was no presentation on how his face and movements were constructed, and I should think that even non-fans would find this unacceptable. Gollum, such a convincingly acted and created figure, really should have taken centre stage.
Leaving the exhibition floor, I went home with a feeling that this exhibition was simply not designed for those with an interest in Lord of the Rings, or even filmmaking in general. Instead, it was too reticent, geared to impress and tease before the release of the final instalment of the trilogy.
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