Orinoco_Womble said:

umm, I dunno about that. The LOTR series is fantastic, but that bit in ROTK where the ghosts are sweeping and circling up through Minas Tirith near the end kinda looks like a 'scooby doo' cartoon effect to me. That completely jolts me out of the movie every time.

Also, the original Golum in Fellowship' looks pretty dated these days, but doesn't detract too much from the movie itself.
I think the best visual 'effect' Peter jackson used in those movies is the New Zealand scenery itself. No CG can possibly compete with that!

I guess I have never really had a problem with the Dead Men of Dunharrow sequence. I suppose I see that as an example of something that would be hard to do without CG and still look good. CGI is really a wonderful innovation in film making, it is when it is used unecessarily and excessively that it bugs me. I felt this bit of the film put it to good use. Not sure what Jackson's alternative would have been to effectively show this scene without CG.

Yeah, the orinal Golum did look pretty rough, but we only see him very breifly. I have always felt that they probably did this on purpose, due to the CG Golum not really being good enough yet. There was really no other reason to keep Golum's appearance a mystery as they did throughout the first film. \

Most definitely agree on Jackson's use of New Zealand. This is what I am talking about. A lesser director would have been tempted to pull a George, get several really high quality shots of places he wanted to be Middle-Earth, and filmed his actors on a green screen and digitally created his world behind them. This seems to be what was done on the recent Indiana Jones move, it is just absurd.