Magical monster tour

Two burning questions pursued me like a pair of Black Riders as I made my way to the Science Museum on the opening day of its Lord of the Rings Motion Picture Trilogy - The Exhibition. The first concerned the suitability of exhibiting cinematic bits and bobs in such august surroundings, when Planet Hollywood has been invented entirely for that purpose.

The second, and much more important question was would the magic of these movies survive being dismantled and revealed in all its workaday nuts and bolts?

The first question is easy to answer. The science that animates Lord of the Rings is the science of the future applied to an idealised vision of the past.

The internal combustion engine, the properties of a magnet, and the workings of a vacuum are all very well explained elsewhere, but this is the science of magic. And the science of magic is the most modern and sexy we have.

The second question - whether finding out how they did it would spoil it - is more complicated. This is not, it must be stressed, a gruelling experience. The scale of the exhibition is not as epic as its subject and a tour of the interconnecting modules should take no longer than one hour - longer for fanatics.

Among the host of entertaining facts pertaining to the making of the films, we learn that in the scene where the Black Riders pursue Arwen and Frodo, the latter was mostly represented by a puppet.

Since we know that much of what swirled around real-life actors on screen was a digital fantasy, this should not matter in the slightest, but somehow the thought of a puppet bouncing around on horseback slightly tarnishes the dream.

This is, however, a minor quibble. What is most fascinating about the exhibition is the amount of old-fashioned craftsmanship involved.

Breeding 10,000 digital horses from 100 real ones on screen is a technical feat that we take on trust and with the requisite amount of awe. A technical talking head explains that they can now do this without making all the horses look the same.

On the other hand, the revelation that a real blacksmith's forge was created on set in New Zealand to make armour and swords for the films takes us back to an ancient branch of science, when it was first discovered that superheated metal becomes malleable.