Peter Jackson would make sure that the battle wasn’t just going to be a cool spectacle to look at (even though it is), but also as a narrative linchpin that would showcase major characters undergoing drastic changes to their personality: basically, it made the good guys even better and made the bad guys more evil. GIF from Giphyīut beyond its technical marvel, the Battle of Helm’s Deep was also a stroke storytelling genius. That Helm’s Deep exemplifies this approach only underlines the fact it’s a mindset that works. This approach to the Lord of the Rings earned it its well-deserved accolades and helped it become the classic trilogy that it is today. It also set a new standard rule: only use computer effects when there is no physical way to create something, everything else you do for real. The precision and sophistication by which Jackson merged practical and digital effects became the benchmark for realism in movies.
In a time when studios would shell out millions of dollars for their digital effects, Peter Jackson went the other way and spent that money on extras, real horses, building sets, and basically going back to hand-made movie magic. Peter Jackson was aware of this, and decided to go against the grain and instead perfect the use of practical effects. By the time The Matrix came out in 1999, Hollywood was in a special effects arms race to see who could produce the most realistic fake scenes into movies. A Technical MarvelĪt the time of the movie’s release, most of Hollywood was basking in the glow of the CGI revolution with the advent of better CGI effects for movies, many studios over the course of a couple of years decided to pretty much slip it in whenever they can. But what a 10 minute scene it was! Every moving part of the Battle of Helm’s Deep worked so well with, not only the whole of The Two Towers movie, but the entire trilogy in general. Out of those 120 days, the crew managed to shoot over 20 hours of footage, only 10 minutes of which making the final cut. The whole battle scene took a grand total of 120 days to film, which is actually 10 days more than the shooting schedule of some films.
Basically, Peter Jackson started a war, and then shot it. The cast and crew spent 90 nights shooting in the dark, with sleeting rain and thousands upon thousands of extras.
Speaking of nights, most of the scene was filmed only in nighttime. Almost all of the rain we see in the battle was natural, with man-made rain only being used during warm nights. While CGI was used to enhance other features in the Battle of Helm’s Deep, there are just some things that are best left to nature. In fact, there were so many extras that they had to convert a stadium into an oversized sound studio just to record the war cries of every Orc. For the most part, the Orcish army we see on-screen was made up of thousands upon thousands of extras, all decked out in battle armor and makeup. Not only did they use more than 20,000 extras, Peter Jackson and crew also used state-of-the-art CGI technology like the MASSIVE (Multiple Agent Simulation System in Virtual Environment) animation program, which helped them exponentially increase the number of extras on screen with CGI models but making them act independently for a more human feel.īut again, let me reiterate: MASSIVE was used to augment, not replace, large-scale crowds and battles. The Battle of Helm’s Deep serves as the narrative climax of The Two Towers.
From its technical mastery, moving and poignant dialogue, and superb acting, not even the Battle of Pelennor Fields (which, in itself, was a stunning work of art) could touch Helm’s Deep. In terms of scale, extremely few movies can compete: instead of relying completely on cinematic spectacle, the Battle of Helm’s Deep used technology to augment the emotion and the storytelling already present in the movie, leveraging the special effects to underline the story arcs of each character.
In fact, almost 20 years after its release, and very few movies or TV shows have been able to match it, let alone come close. Ask any movie fan, and they’ll tell you that the Battle of Helm’s Deep in The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers is still one of the most visually stunning and technically complex battle scenes in all of movie history.