(Credits: Far Out / Tengyart / Hasan Almasi)
Throughout the history of cinema, grand battle scenes were staged with breathtaking realism – but at enormous cost and effort. Directors like Cecil B. DeMille and Sergei Eisenstein used thousands of extras to stage epic battles in films like The Ten Commandments and Battleship Potemkin. These directors had to manage the sheer logistical nightmares of coordinating masses of people, animals, and props to recreate large-scale conflicts.
The result was, of course, breathtaking. I dare anyone to watch the sea battle in 1959’s Ben Hur or the tens of hundreds of extras charging across North Africa in David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia. Even 2022’s Babylon deliberately opted for real extras to populate its own movie within a movie. While undeniably grand, these projects were constrained by the limitations of human resources, budgets, and the technical complexities involved in coordinating such massive events.
However, the formula for creating monumental battle scenes saw a paradigm shift as we moved into the digital age. It was no longer just about recruiting an army of extras and meticulously planning every combat move. Instead, the magic started happening in the digital realm, thanks to pioneering technology developed by New Zealand-based Weta Digital.
Enter Peter Jackson’s acclaimed Lord of the Rings trilogy, released from 2001 to 2003. With the assistance of Weta Digital’s specialised crowd-simulation software, the movies shattered all previous records by featuring battles with an unprecedented 200,000 characters. The program, sensibly named Massive, fused digital animation with early artificial intelligence to govern individual character interactions, creating a spectacle of unparalleled scale and complexity.
What sets Massive apart is its innovative use of AI, allowing each digitally-created soldier to act and react in ways that mimic real-life human behaviour – not just this, but to do it ‘independently’. By allowing the program to govern the movements, animators were spared from tailoring the movements of each of the 200,000 figures. This leap in technology generated battle scenes that were vast in scale and eerily realistic. The technology altered the very foundations of what directors considered possible, raising the bar for epic cinema to an entirely new level.
The impact of this technological marvel goes beyond just the world of fantasy depicted in Lord of the Rings. It’s an industry-changing innovation that has set new standards for what can be achieved in storytelling, scale, and realism. However, it’s worth noting that the CGI was layered over meticulously crafted production design, costumes and real locations, ensuring authenticity throughout. As a result, the trilogy remains unparalleled even as of 2023, holding its place as the standard by which all grand cinematic battles are judged.
While advancements in technology continue to redefine the boundaries of the possible, the enormous battles in the lands of Middle-earth stand alone in their breathtaking scope and detail. They serve as a vivid example of the astonishing feats that can be accomplished when cutting-edge technology is fused with the limitless scope of human imagination.
