Peter Jackson’s “Lord of the Rings” trilogy is one of the great cinema epics of the last 20 years and continues to impress with its massive production effort, class-leading visual effects and unprecedented richness of detail. The reward: a massive box office of three billion dollars worldwide – and a total of 17 Oscars, with the third installment alone winning all eleven Academy Awards for which it was nominated.
Until the New Zealand director took up the subject, JRR Tolkien’s fantasy novels of the 1950s were regarded as unfilmable – the storylines and fable world devised by Tolkien were far too complex. Accordingly, almost no one can remember the 1978 animated version, and the Amazon series “The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power”, which tells the story before “The Hobbit” and “The Lord of the Rings”, mostly fell for the fans. Not even Peter Jackson himself could do thathobbittrilogy to the brilliance of its own creation.
But even in perfect films, the devil of error creeps in every now and then – or rather, there is hardly a major film production that does it completely without connection errors or other omissions. An error of “Lord of the Rings – The company of the ring‘ is especially vicious because, once discovered, it is capable of completely destroying the audience’s illusion – and nothing is more important in a fictional, visually stunning fantasy world like Middle-earth!
Relatively early in the nearly three-hour film, as we get to know the Shire, the camera follows a horde of children running after the carriage of Gandalf (Ian McKellen) and Frodo (Elijah Wood). At this point, it’s better not to pay too much attention to the left edge of the photo – because from minute 10 and 33 seconds it is clear to see that not only the tracks of the narrow car wheels can be seen on the road, but also the profile of tires. And of course this shouldn’t even exist in a medieval world without technology!
You can clearly see the error here:
The tire tracks are believed to have come from the camera car, but they could also have been caused by another vehicle. The fact is: In this scene, the film crew clearly failed to cover the traces of the modern world! But thank goodness Peter Jackson’s art of illusion is strong enough to make the audience forget in the next scene that even Middle-earth is just a movie set after all…