LOTR reimagined: likes and dislikes

There's been a trend, lately, of reimagining movies partially through AI. I think I showed a vid of Star Wars reimagined through a Japanese lens recently. Below is another gallery ("Part 2," apparently) that runs the characters from Lord of the Rings through an AI filter. Overall, I don't see much of a departure from the Peter Jackson aesthetic, and that's disappointing. But I thought I'd take time to post my reactions to each individual place or character shown. Here's the video first; my reactions are under the video. Enjoy.

Gandalf the White: meh. At this point, Sir Ian McKellen owns the cinematic version of Gandalf, and I'm too loyal to that version to be tempted away by this blander rendition.

Gollum: meh to this as well. If you're going to go through the trouble of doing an AI rendering of these characters, then let your AI off the chain!

King Theoden: as a certain Oval Office occupant says, Come on, man! Surely, you can do better. I'd say that we're 0 for 3 at this point.

Helm's Deep: aside from some minor differences in the helmets and armor, there's not much to see here. I'd call this another miss.

Let me pause for a second to note that, taken on their own terms, these partially AI renderings aren't terrible. I wouldn't call what I'm seeing bad art. But my standard of judgment is whether the art somehow manages to be true to Tolkien's vision (keeping in mind that my knowledge of Tolkien's vision is limited) while also being a sincere-yet-respectful departure from Peter Jackson's vision. This is why LOTR loyalists have been groaning for years about not seeing Guillermo del Toro's version of The Hobbit. True: del Toro has a pretty specific aesthetic when he does fantasy—wings with eyes, tentacles, etc. And it's possible that the specificity of his vision could have ruined Tolkien's little book. But I think del Toro could have brought something to the party that wouldn't have been a mere Jackson ripoff.

Ent: I'm really not liking the Ent here. This is guy-in-latex territory.

Eowyn: it looks as though Miranda Otto got replaced by Olivia Wilde.

Eagle: I'll give the AI a pass on this one because I can't see too many ways of doing an imaginative Eagle without accidentally turning it into some other kind of bird. Or maybe I'm too limited by my own imagination.

Mount Doom: imposing, but how accurate is it? I'm no vulcanologist, but I have to wonder about a volcano that still has a sharp peak instead of the usual caldera. (Okay, a bit of Googling shows that volcanoes with peaks are possible: there are stratovolcanoes and volcanoes with lava domes that form a sort of ever-evolving peak.) Still, I'm not that charmed by this representation of Mount Doom.

Rider of Rohan: ...okay in a generic way, I guess. Doesn't really strike my fancy.

Minas Morgul: fortress of the Nazgûl, Minas Morgul looks imposing and foreboding in this rendering, but it's still not breaking away from the Peter Jackson aesthetic.

Minas Tirith: finally! Something that looks distinctly different—to my eyes, anyway. I liked the version I saw in the movies, but I like this version, too, even if the layer-caked structure of the capital city (described by Tolkien) isn't in evidence.

Saruman: if you're going to use the image of someone who somewhat resembles the great Sir Christopher Lee, you might as well just use Christoper Lee. I feel a bit bad for Sir Christopher, who was a great fan of Tolkien, and who apparently had high hopes for Saruman's portrayal on screen. He was polite about being disappointed, but he was disappointed.

Sauron: I don't know enough Tolkien lore to know how human Sauron was in his—to use video-game terminology—final form. The "Rings of Power" TV series imagined him as a charming human who, to no one's surprise, nefariously revealed himself and his plans at the end of Season One (Amazon is working on Season 2, God help us). In the Jackson films, Sauron is represented mostly by a Flaming Eye, but at the beginning of the trilogy, he's shown as a humanoid in armor. The AI art dares to show Sauron's face, and I admit I'm fascinated. It's a ballsy move to depict He Who Must Not Be Faced (again, for all I know, Sauron has a countenance in Tolkien's writings), and I kind of like it. Of course, with no flesh on his face, this Sauron has the problem faced by skeletal villains everywhere: no lips to form consonants and shape vowels. Is he missing a tongue, too? I guess he shapes air that escapes his throat via magic. The pointy-armor look still harks back to Jackson, though.

Shelob: ah, the first rendition that I truly like! Instead of the giant-tarantula-with-inappropriate-stinger look, this Shelob has a face with a Lovecraftian feel. (I think Shelob has a stinger in the books, so Tolkien either knew little about spiders, or he didn't care.) Glowing eyes, cold light streaming in—nice touches. And is that an armored abdomen? Good luck, Sam! Meesa outta here!

Uruk-hai: why do I look at that image and see Ricardo Montalban in "Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan"? This does nothing for me.

The Witch-king of Angmar: leader of the Ringwraiths, and generally portrayed on film as invisible (or was that the Witch-king visibly reaching toward Frodo in "The Fellowship of the Ring"?), gets a makeover here as someone plainly visible. Not bad, but still a bit too much of a dude-in-latex look.

The Tower of Sauron: is that supposed to be the same tower upon which burns the Flaming Eye? If yes, then the face is utterly unnecessary.

Leave your own thoughts in the comments.