Forbidden West doing the cutscene-gameplay inconsistency stuff.
Doing a quest where you infiltrate an enemy stronghold thing so you can open the gate to let your allies in to fight the enemy force together. Being the epic gamer that I am I stealth kill everything first, no enemies left.
When I open the gate, a cutscene starts where another random enemy appears out of nowhere, says “END OF THE LINE!” and then activates a thing that summons an enemy robot to fight.
I don’t mind fighting enemy robots but there was no one left to fight in this place. I killed them all. This dude turned up outta nowhere with a summon spell ready to cast just in case? Really? It’s the middle of the night!
It was a really weird decision. Frankly, it’s not just the hair, they completely missed the mark in aesthetics despite having ready-made templates from pretty much all fantasy released in the past two decades, ever.
Other than Galadriel and to some extent Arondir, none of the elves in this series feel like elves to me. It’s not just hair, it’s a combination of subtle things required to sell the elf vibe: casting choices (I like Charles Edwards, but he’s too old to play Celebrimbor), costumes, body language, lighting, an overall sense of dignity and grace in speech that’s largely missing in this series. I largely agree with the opinion I heard that if you’re filming fantasy and your viewers can’t tell your elves and your humans apart without looking at their ears, you need to go back to the drawing board.
On the good side, I enjoyed Numenor. I think portraying it as a blend of historical Mediterranean cultures, rather than Generic Fantasy Europe, was spot on (Tolkien himself compared Numenor to Ancient Egypt in their love for monumental architecture), and Miriel and Elendil’s casting was excellent and has firmly entered my own headcanon in how I imagine these characters.
I’ve found that a lot of the modern fantasy series felt like a low-budget fan tribute in terms of set and props, I don’t know. I can’t put my finger on it, everything seems too plastic or not quite right; like you can tell the set is built out of wood and polystyrene. Wheel of Time really suffered from this to. But eh.
That’s because they are plastic props or CGI, creating an uncanny valley effect.
The LOTR movies, on the other hand, used authentic materials to have as much visual verisimilitude as possible:
Animals were studied to make the creatures biologically believable; weapons and armour were based on appropriate medieval or classical era peoples. Some 48,000 pieces of armour, 10,000 arrows, 500 bows, 10,000 Orc heads, 1,800 pairs of Hobbit feet serving as shoes, and 19,000 costumes were created for the filming.
