Hell, every time someone peers over the side of castle I think, "We've already got one!"

Not RotK, but did anyone else who saw Master and Commander have problems keeping a straight face when the French ship was ordering the Surprise to prepare to be boarded? I kept thinking "Oh my dog, that's John Cleese" and kept waiting for "your mother was a hamster and your father smells of eldeberries, etc.".

I can see it from your side too, Ita. And to be fair, at my showing Gimli's 'Certain death, no chance of success, what are we waiting for?' got one of two applause moments in the movie, I just miss seeing my favorite character kick the bad guy's arses up 'round their ears.

Steph, I had a python moment or two there as well. I managed quite well too restrain myself from yelling out 'Pitchez la vache!'

Davids, exactly, and with light cavalry at that. harassing would definitely have been the way to go. It would even have still been very interesting visually, big aerial pans of the Rohirrim doing all those formation changes on the fly, big circular slashing attacks (and not in a three hobbits bouncing around on the bed way).

My thing with Legolas is that I look at the fight stuctures in movies a bit from a Pro Wrestling standpoint. And psychology wise, Legolas is crap. He's like Rob Van Dam, doing all these big flashy suspension of disbelief ruining spots with no logic supporting them.

(I should add that the CGI Legolas horse-mounting in TTT didn't throw me out of the scene at all. I think because it was too brief for me to really process "Hey, that's not him....")

Jess, that threw me out of TTT every time I saw it on the big screen, but so completely failed to on the DVDs that I thought they'd redid it.

When it came to Leggy and the Oliphaunt, I did spend time thinking "Wow, technology's come a long way. Oh! There's Orlando again!" which is a step up from "fake fake fake", but way below "How can that be Andy Serkis?" which is the only way I like to be jarred from a CGI moment, if at all.

I might be making this up, but I think they brushed up the Legolas mounting the horse scene for the TTT EE version. I *hated* it when I saw it the theater (and it gave me "oh god this is going to look fake" fear that lasted through the end of RotK) but it looks better to me somehow on the EE. (It's not small screen vs. big screen, I don't think because my theater-release DVDs look bad too.)

Then again, though, maybe not.

Dude, I *loved* Legolas mounting the horse!

I choose to believe it was real, just like vampires with a soul.

Dude, I *loved* Legolas mounting the horse!

As did I. In my case, it helps that I've been around horses maybe three times in my life (about as often as I've been around elephants, actually), and therefore didn't know if it was against the laws of physics or just really, really nifty.

In RotK, I had time to think "fake...blue screen...blue screen...fake...fake," and in TTT, I really didn't. By the second (third, fourth, fifth) time I saw it, I knew it was CG, but was so used to the way it looked that it didn't bug me.

It wouldn't surprise me at all if they tidied it up for the EE DVD release.

It wouldn't surprise me at all if they tidied it up for the EE DVD release.

It's the same as the theatrical. We went back and ran it right away. It might be a screen size thing, or a getting acclimatised thing, I suppose.

Funny, the horse mounting scene throws me off way more than the Oliphaunt scene, because he goes up the horse on the wrong side and his wrist is all catty-whoumpus! The Oliphaunt scene, like Jess said, is fake fake fake, but still really exciting. The horse scene they TOTALLY could have done for real with a crane and stuff.