I never really liked the films much. Actually that's not true, I think they're fine fantasy films, but for me they were about as wide of the mark as one can get when it came to capturing what was for me the overall "feel" of LotR. In part I guess it's two rather polarised subjective takes on it, but it didn't help that Jackson was rather overly liberal with "re-imagining" or just ignoring huge swathes of stuff. That and the seemingly excessive amount of epiiiiiiiic!!! and that he managed to put most of the focus on the parts of the books I skimmed and completely ignored the bits I enjoyed. I suppose it was very much "Peter Jackson's LotR" in that it's a significantly different vision and one that feels rather appropriated. I mean Middle Earth isn't in NZ, it's here. And here features more mud than appeared in the films.
Yeah I know, "it wasn't as good as the book!" said nobody ever who read the book any given film was based on.
I've spent so long shaking my fist at nobody in particular I've now completely forgotten what my actual point was. Oh well, it's time for me to go to bed anyway.
I agree with these sentiments. Another thing that occurred to me is that while NZ probably made sense to shoot the films, LotR was drawn heavily from Nordic mythology and as a half Scandi myself, a casual walk though some old Swedish forest gives far more of a LotR feel than NZ does, in my opinion. The work of Swedish artist John Bauer on Scandi fairy tales is wonderfully evocative. In some respects Ralph Bakshi's animated version of LotR, while unfinished and flawed, for me does a wonderful job of conveying the fantasy elements of Middle Earth. Anyway I'm going off topic again, sorry!
BG3 definitely needs some balancing in the world design, there's simply too much epic and not enough mundane.
