I’d also add that yes, they pushed the look of the whole film into “unreal” territory, but they also were very selective and deliberate about where they used CG versus practical effects. Or practical everything, really. In every single possible instance that something could be shot using real elements, it is. The costumes and sets and props are nearly all real, the forced perspective shots are real. As often as possible hobbit actors are just on their knees or the other actors are on appleboxes or replaced with larger/smaller actors from behind instead of being digitally shrunken down or up. The sets were largely built by hand or on location, and the only greenscreen factors in once you get to the far distance. They built the frickin chainmail by hand, even.
Which is the OTHER reason that it holds up. Your eye knowns when you’re looking at a real thing, even if your brain can’t quite articulate why.
Which is why an image like this:
Which are all effects shots! Feel more real than this:
(This is honestly the main reason why I had trouble watching MCU films for so many years. It just don’t look real, guys. I can’t think of anything but how you’re shooting this in a studio somewhere.)
Marvel and LotR are using the same tools, including set extensions, CG, color grading, all of it, but Marvel tends to use CG and greenscreen on almost every element. LotR is real in every possible way that it can be.
Marvel films are stylized and made to look unreal just like LotR - but they also largely ARE unreal. LotR is mostly real but faked, and there’s a big difference between those things.
The boats, the water, the cliffs, the actors are real. And the statues were real too - just small models, probably smaller than a person, shot separately in similar lighting, then comped onto this shot to look thousands of times larger than they actually are. Then the whole image is graded and blended together so that the colors are seamless, the cliff edges are extended so that you can’t see the edges, add a little digital mist in the far background there to really sell it - and boom. Feels real.
Your gut knows when something is real - which is why it holds up when you rewatch it. No matter how advanced CG gets, and it’s pretty damn advanced at this point, it’s still little pixels on a screen. But real chainmail on a real person standing in a real forest with a little CG far in the back? Two actors of roughly the same size looking like they’re two different sizes just because of where they’re sitting? It feels real because it mostly is.
It’s not just color grading and blending, it’s knowing when and where and how to use things, and then actually taking the time (and the expense) to do it right even when most people won’t be able to tell - or, in a lot of cases, even care.
(CG and greenscreen is absolutely a practical solution in the sense that scheduling issues are hell the way that Marvel shoots things. LotR had the luxury of shooting for a year straight, Marvel has to piecemeal and they don’t always know who they’ll have when, so it’s cheaper to build sets and even costumes in post than it is to build them in preproduction. But it won’t hold up as well as the 20 year old LotR films have over time.)
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