Return of the King, pt. 1.

No, I haven't seen an advance showing, and no, I'm not planning to go out at midnight tonight to see it. But here's a problem they had with the computer graphics that I wouldn't have thought of: to make the CGI battle scenes look realistic by allowing the individual soldiers and horses act independently, they gave the little computer soldiers a degree of artificial intelligence, to control their actions (running, fighting, avoiding obstacles, with an overall goal of advancing upon and engaging the overwhelming might of the enemy line). And the little soldiers responded appropriately: they took one look at the hordes of evil, and fled the battlefield. "For the first two years, the biggest problem we had was soldiers fleeing the field of battle," the special effects designer said. "We could not make their computers stupid enough to not run away."