The difference is that Numenor had to order their armor from Amazon
That’s some Temu shit if I’ve ever seen it.
You might be right. That would be classic Amazon values to order from someone even cheaper…
The people involved in The Good One know historical armor, and how it’s supposed to fit, while also knowing how to blend in the fantasy elements that make them pop
The New One just wants to look pretty, while clearly having vastly underestimated the needed budget to make good costumes.
Honestly, I think I’ve seen some repainted Spirit Halloween stuff.
Granted, a good prop/costume department can make anything cheap look good. I’ve seen a lot of plumbing parts attached to Sci fi guns. (some ship guns are literally entirely plumbing parts with vfx lasers done in post)
I’d love to see a total breakdown of the expenses. I’d wager the costume department is one of the lowest on the list.
LPT: If you want armor that allows proper motion, you need sliding joints, or narrow areas with less protection. The chest piece should not be flat across the bottom, nor should it come down to your waist. You can’t bend properly with the one on the right. Range of motion on the arms is also severely limited, which makes combat basically a death sentence for you since you literally can’t move your arms to block high.
Boromir on the other hand, everything allows for greater range of motion. The chest piece flares out once it goes a little past the ribcage, which while probably wouldn’t win you any yoga competitions, allows you to bend and ride a horse. The pauldrons are oversized to cover the thinner shoulder straps, so the arms can rotate up properly, and the armor around all the joints slides nicely over itself.
Once you know how to make GOOD armor, you start realizing a lot of modern movies just clearly have no consideration for it. It’s all about what looks cool to the average person.
Skallagrim on youtube has some breakdowns of historic accuracy in movies, but he usually focuses on the combat itself. Though every point I’ve brought up comes up in one way or another during combat.
The one on the right doesn’t look cool though. Boramir looks way cooler.
*to the average person
I regret to inform you that a great many people find it “cool”, including a lot of the people I know who are huge fans of the Peter Jackson films.
Im not sure I’d say anywhere near half the people who have seen it would say it’s “cool” but unfortunately the average person doesn’t really know much about what makes good armor. I don’t fault them for it, but I do fault the show for it.
Boromir is infinitely cooler even without the armor.
Regardless, you know someone looked at that thing, and said to themselves “yeah, this is good. This is correct.” which is just… Unfortunate.
One on the right looks like Immortan Joe’s muscle armour
One on the right is more accurate based on my museum tours. Can’t hate on either imo
I’m genuinely curious, do you happen to recall what museums you may have seen similar designs at? I’m interested to see when their estimated age was and from what regions, because I can totally see people making armor like that, it’s just not as effective as actual combat armor as what’s on the left.
I’ve seen some pretty wildly impractical armors, and weapons over the years.
All of the metal ages all had wonky weapon designs at the starts, as we were still figuring out how to work things, how to kill each other, and how to use the new shiny stuff to our advantage.
And don’t get me started on ceremonial outfits/weapons… Those are just… No. Just no.
Granted, a good prop/costume department can make anything cheap look good.
Yes, but good prop departments aren’t cheap.
Also, fully agree on the difference between actual armor and crappy lookalikes. I’ve seen and worn plenty of shitty larp armor to know how incredibly annoying they are. I also own a historical replica, and you can do everything in it (except sit on a chair with a backrest).
For the record, a modern infantryman can’t do that either. Someday we’ll solve that problem!
Weta Workshop are some cool motherfuckers.
Also the pecs fairing out on the right would guide a blade in, while the left flairs out in the center to be convex everywhere and guide a blade away. It’s the same concept as tank armor. Convex armor allows an incoming object to slide away instead of having no where else to go and all the energy coming in.
OTOH a gambeson under an ill fitting breastplate was pretty good armor for most people for a couple thousand years. To this day getting armor to fit right and be used correctly is a struggle. Including orders to wear pieces that severely restrict movement. But that kind of realism kind of misses the point of fantasy as a genre.
Honestly the gambeson is underrated.
It’s crazy how good densely packed cloth can be at stopping cuts, and the padding basically makes a mace strike feel more like a barefisted punch.
Most of the costumes in the show are very, very good tbf. It’s something they generally did well. Same goes for the props.
I also wouldn’t really compare heavy “in battle” armour against some more casual armour that he wore off-duty.
E: Here is Elendil’s battle armour, which is probably a more apt comparison to Boromir’s heavy armour.
Both look really cheap, and are badly designed, especially when compared to lotr.
For example look at the angles on the chest.
Boromir’s armour is angled to deflect incoming strikes. So if someone tries to stab him in the chest, the strike will slide off. It makes sense, and is the basis of good, functional armour throughout history.
Now look at these other two. You can aim for the heart, miss and hit the ribs, and the tip will still slide and go under the pec. It directs all strikes towards your heart instead of away from it.
Also, what’s with the shoulders on the guy from the show? It’s shaped like scales, but looks like the same material as the breastplate. Sure, armor can have a lot of decoration, but that means he can’t lift his arms very high. Boromir has proper, segmented pauldrons. If he lifts his arms up, the plates slide past each other and he’s good to go.
Also, armpits are one of the biggest weak points in armor. Boromir gets hit in the armpit (or a point slides off his breastplate into his armpit) and his chainmail has a good chance of stopping it from penetrating or at the very least from getting too deep into him. The Aragorn we have at home is wearing what I will charitably assume is a gambeson, no mail. The tip of a pike or spear slips in and he’s got a punctured lung.
You’d think for a billion dollars they could pay a consultant to work with the wardrobe department, especially because they’re following up a film series known for absolutely excellent costume design.
It matches breastplates from hoplites, though. It makes sense if we think LOTR = Middle Ages and ROP = Ancient Rome.
Except arda is a world that’s deteriorating and not developing
You got a point. But in a way so was the Middle Ages. A lot of knowledge was lost and forgotten, especially in arts. Doesn’t mean some things won’t improve.
Would be nice to see the numenorians fighting in a shield wall formation, would justify not focusing on a full plate, which is better suited for solo/mounted combat like a knight does.
My thoughts: Rohan has the technology of the early middle ages, def a step down from imperial roman times. But even the late empire saw a loss in technology and centralised armories (more maille than Lorica Segmentata).
But the high middle ages had better metal working than the Roman empire. I would say Gondor is more equal to the high ma then the early ma like Rohan. But the cool thing is, their armour is not straight up copied from a specific culture (like Italian or German armour). Esp the helmets are very different from a stereotypical knights visor helmet. That makes Gondor feel unique and more fantastical than just “European medieval”.
Now the hoplites. Hoplites are from the era if greek poleis, before imperial, republican or even monarchical Rome. Technologically, that’s the bronze age and def less developed than imp Rome or the MA. But that’s not a bad thing.
In the intro sequence of lotr fotr during the great war of the second age , the elves have a greek inspired armour. Corinthian style helmets with the iconic face shape cutout and the long horse tail. But they also are not a copy and feel like their own thing.
So… I don’t need the numenorians to have more rivets or better shoulder joints. Mostly what is disappearing in Arda is not knowledge, but magic. So choosing greek inspiration is cool. But they need to feel 1) not copied 2) more magical than Gondor.
The costumes are good, but the armor in the show is all over the place.
According to this blog post by a military historian, that “scale” armor you linked is the worst of a bad bunch:
Perhaps the worst offender (which unfortunately gets a lot of screentime) is the odd Númenórean scale armor. Now scale armor was not necessarily a bad idea here (it could make for an interesting visual motif connecting the seafaring Númenóreans with fish-scales, for instance), but there are two immediate problems with this armor. First, it doesn’t seem structured like scale armor. The strong cording around the edges and rigid spaulders make it look like rigid armor made to look like it is composed of scales. The effect is only increased because the backing is shaped to give it pectoral muscles (and chests for women, which is doubly silly). But that’s not how historical scale armor hangs on the body.
Scale armor is [supposed to be] a lot more flexible (with the downside that the very flexibility of the scales means that a strike from below can pass beneath them and through the armor) and would thus hang and shape to the body. This armor does not do that. Instead as noted what this looks like are solid plates that are made to look like they are made out of scales. And that’s also not a terrible idea except that the actors are then also wearing scale-armor-print shirts underneath the armor which makes it clear that we’re to understand a flexible scale armor covering the whole of the upper body, which this clearly isn’t.
What on earth is this armor made out of? The queen’s armor looks like it might be bronze, albeit less well polished than I’d expect for royalty, but everyone else’s scale armor is made of this dull off-white material that looks like plastic or pressed foam, presumably because it is plastic or pressed foam. Surely this stuff should be made of iron?
You also get the bonus factor from it being made by skilled Numenorean smiths who had access to techniques used by the Noldor and whatnot. Maybe it was mithril or something too. Dunno, but it’s not a huge ask to suspend disbelief on this one.
It looks cheap and poorly made, though. With this budget, they could have just made scale armor that actually looks like scale armor. Especially for prominent characters.
They had SO much money, and I bet if they went to any fantasy festival or a decent larp and said “who wants to make us a full-sized scale armor for 5000 bucks and a mention in the credits of LotR” they would have to break up the resulting rush of volunteers.
Yeah, I hope the Noldor could produce something better than this cheap plastic looking piece of trash shown here.
That’s good to hear, at least.
If you want to read a military historian’s long take on Rings of Power armor, here you go. Spoiler: he’s not a fan, although he did like most of the armor in the LotR trilogy (elsewhere on his blog).
These are fascinating articles, thank you very much for linking the site!
The virgin vs chad meme template update we didn’t know we needed
I have seen the show. The costumes are the very least of their worries…
I think the most memorable moment for me was when Peter Mullan appeared on screen as an old dwarf king. And in that moment everybody else in the show was immediately identified as being merely an actor rather than a character.
I think it had some good scenes, but I’ve already come to accept that I’m in the minority of people who didn’t mind the show overall. It definitely had a lot of problems I had to overlook and I almost stopped after the third episode it was so slow in the beginning, but by the end, I was feeling forgiving for some reason. The dwarf scenes helped a lot for sure.
I like it, don’t care if internet groups don’t, it was decent.
same. there’s things I didn’t like about it, but I enjoyed it
I also liked it. I enjoyed it more than the hobbit movies.
Yay! They’re are dozens of us! Dozens!
That’s kind of a low bar though. They stretched out the Hobbit like butter over too much bread.
at it’s weakest.
at its* weakest.
It is weakest
It was so weak it couldn’t manage to use proper grammar.
I did think a lot of the costumes and set design were almost Monty python / ewok, I guess I mean prop-like rather than believable.
I had no idea the budget was so much larger.
They call me…
…Tim.
Got it! Warmongers are weak, while a powerful society has no need to heavily fund the military.
Precisely. When warmongering dictators with imperialistic ambitions invade your nation, just throw their magical ring into a hot mountain.
$ Dollar
Seriously? A billion???
I think it’s $200 mil a season and in an interview they said that they planned 5 seasons, so thats where the reported billion comes from. It’s a bit misleading, but still a lot of money. RoP is certainly not as good looking, but if you’re accounting for inflation and runtime the numbers make more sense.
It’s very misleading.
It’s only $715,000,000.00 for the rights and the first season.
https://www.distractify.com/p/rings-of-power-budget-per-episode
It’s not a billion, but it’s twice as much as the 3 LotR movies.
So with inflation, around the same actual budget, but stricter time constraints
Really puts the ‘ass’ in ‘cuirass’!
Oh no is that how that word is spelled?
That’s how it’s spelled in modern English, but I think French has it as cuirasse.
Catwalk fashion vs High Street fashion
at least the shirt almost looks like a gambeson if you squint, just needs to be thicker.
It just feels like they’re following Disney’s terrible live-action sensibilities, where instead of researching practicalities and historical craftsmanship, they’re just hiring fancy Broadway theatre costumers and everybody’s running around in hyper-saturated neo-technicolor polyester and pleather “armor.”
I feel really bad knocking people who are obviously dedicated to their craft but the direction of fantasy television anymore is always so derivative of whatever trended last.
Weta’s peerless work set an iconic, timeless, instantly-recognizable standard. If I saw RoP without context I’d be like “Oh they remade CW’s Reign or is this a GoT spin-off or a Disney thing or what…?”
