T w e n t y S i d e d
From The Archives:
The Best of 2014
My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2014.
Spec Ops: The Line
A videogame that judges its audience, criticizes its genre, and hates its premise. How did this thing get made?
Resident Evil 4
Who is this imbecile and why is he wandering around Europe unsupervised?
Do It Again, Stupid
One of the highest-rated games of all time has some of the least interesting gameplay.
Project Octant
A programming project where I set out to make a Minecraft-style world so I can experiment with Octree data.
Ridiculous contrivances?! A room full of skulls?? Bah.
A wizard can shoot fire from any conceivable place on his body, but your sticking point is a room full of skulls?
I guess “unrealistic” really is in the mind of the reader.
I really wonder why this scene was filmed. Hadn’t the ghosts just agreed to serve Aragorn in exchange for freedom?
Why try to kill him now? If this wasn’t meant to kill him, what was it meant to achieve? If the ghosts didn’t do this, who did?
It’s not even as though the ghosts all got up from their sarcophagi and the collective weight shift knocked over all the plinths or something (they don’t look or act any different later, so the thought that something like that happened isn’t supported by screen evidence).
If it they payload wasn’t hogging all the incredulity, the narrative pacing would.
Did someone come back from the prop room with a wheelbarrow full of skulls and dared Peter Jackson to use them in a scene? Did a set builder accidentally puncture a pressurised skull vein in the cave they were filming in?
Maybe in this version the ghosts are bound to the skulls. Aragorn has to take all of these with him. The holds of the ships later are just filled with skulls.
Three people loading several cargo holds with thousands of loose skulls with any kind of speed is almost more unbelievable than 3 people sailing multiple ships up the river (the ghosts are very clearly immaterial) lol
Maybe they’re just being attacked by a Demi-lich with the DnD Swarm template as a random encounter?
Or the ghosts could be deliberately trashing the place as an end-of-lease party?
The undead didn’t agree to help Aragorn until the following scene, after the trio escapes the room full of falling skulls and makes it outside to where they can see the corsair fleet.
This particular moment is in the extended version of the movie, but not in the theatrical version. (The shot of the first skulls rolling on the ground, in preparation for the later DVD release, was actually filmed after the movie cleaned up on Oscar night.)