The Lord of the Rings: this Gollum created by an AI is so much scarier than that of the Peter Jackson trilogy

News culture The Lord of the Rings: this AI-created Gollum is so much creepier than the one in Peter Jackson’s trilogy

Published on 05/26/2023 at 06:45

The Lord of the Rings has a lot of ultra-cult characters and among the most popular, we can easily count Gollum (who we may have all imitated at least once). Precisely, this version “imagined” by an AI should delight fans of Sméagol… and give them a little shiver of dread.

He is back

You may have read Tolkien’s books or simply seen Peter Jackson’s films: in any case, everyone knows Gollum, this famous character stranded in Middle-earth in search of his most… precious possession. His unique phrasing, his gimmicks, but also his deceit and aggressiveness make him an unpredictable character with multiple personalities.

In itself, not really a nice guy to hang out with, but we still love him in spite of ourselves: it must be said that in the cinema, he was brilliantly interpreted by Andy Serkis, the actor also lending his movements via motion capture… as well as some features of his face. The pictorial version of Gollum that we all know in the cinema is therefore similar to Serkis, but what could the character look like with other directives?

Artist Jose Luis Rodriguez Mena asked an artificial intelligence to image Gollum and there is no denying it: this new version seems to want to suck your soul, even through your screen. A very bad traveling companion.

The cold shower

We also talk a lot about Gollum at the moment, but not necessarily for good reasons: the reviews of the video game dedicated to him, in which we play the character throughout, have fallen… and are particularly bad. On Metacritic, The Lord of the Rings Gollum achieves a very poor score of 40%.

A real ax for this small studio that has been working on the project for years and years now. We blame the title not having a sufficiently impactful story (knowing that it is a software with a pronounced narrative aspect), major weaknesses in terms of gameplay and level design as well as many small technical problems. It must be said that during our last preview, we were not reassured either.

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