This side by side comparison sure is something
on the one side we have GORGEOUSLY handcrafted armor. Looks like actual plate, the white tree of Gondor clear and easy to see and echoed on the pauldrons and even pressed into his belt! Which is folded in a LOVELY knot to hold it in place. The chainmail is REAL chainmail. And over all there’s some good wear on it, it looks like Boromir has owned and worked and lived in this armor
And on the other side we have stuff that looks like it was created for a shoe string budgeted made-for-TV Camelot production. It’s CLEARLY plastic. And wtf is that LENGTH that leaves a huge swath of his VITAL ORGANS unprotected???? The symbol is PRINTED on it, not even embossed, and so poorly you can’t even really tell what it’s supposed to be. It looks, as far as I can tell, like someone smooshed a bunch of pseudo celtic symbols together. Those shoulder things are NOT pauldrons. They seem to be some half arsed attempt at coin style chainmail? Maybe? I have NO idea what that shirt is. It looks like maybe the designers were going for a type of Gambeson, but it’s just way WAY too thin. It ALL looks like they hit the after halloween sale at party city for supplies.
cc: @petermorwood
This was a show with no grasp of time, no grasp of distance, and no grasp of even fantasy realism - swimming from Valinor back to Middle Earth? Shrugging off a pyroclastic flow? - so I'm not surprised it has no grasp of Hero Props.
"Hero Prop" is the term for Boromir's armour, indeed any armour, costume or accoutrements worn by a Principal Character in LOTR or any other movie.
"Hero" has nothing to do with the character's alignment, applying to Sauron and the Witch-King as well. It means any costume, weapon etc. made as detailed as possible because the character wearing it will be front and centre in very close shots, where an IMAX screen might make any flaws a metre high.
(Bernard Hill was amazed by the details in Théoden's armour, some of which only he and his dresser ever saw. More here.)
Now there's the Numenorean bargain-basement rig up there, and the full plate of the Action Heroine here.
I don't know what it's made of, but it looks like vac-formed, spray-painted plastic.
Compare it to an example of Elven armour from The Hobbit movies, which notoriously didn't have anything like the development time of LOTR...
No further comment.
WETA were involved in some of the design work and creation for the props and weapons for Rings of Power and you can easily spot them compared to the spray-painted chainmail and ill-fitting costumes on the leads.
These images are from a post they put on facebook about the sun motif they developed for the Numenorean armour
They also worked on details for the Silvan elves, including Arondir’s weapons (and armour, based on quality and aesthetic alone)
And these lads
The difference is staggering. Look at the last image and the scaled texture of the armour: this looks like a lad who has made armour and a helmet out of dragon bits, cobbled together with rusted mail from a fallen enemy. It tells you something about the character. Compare it to the bland, shapeless shrink-wrapped stuff they put the leads in.
