The dirty secret to making sci-fi believable
Over the last decade, there’s been a glut of sci-fi and fantasy series on television and streaming. With peak Game of Thrones, House of the Dragon, The Wheel of Time, The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, The Expanse, The Witcher, Silo, Foundation, and more, keeping up with the deluge, and discerning which ones are worth your time, is daunting. But there’s a very simple trick to determining whether or not one of these shows is good, and it’s all about the costumes.
Costumes seem like an obvious barometer, but the measurements may not be what you’re expecting. Rather than looking for costumes with quality, attention to detail, or uniquely inspired designs, all you have to do is look for how dirty the costumes are.
Costume weathering, the process of adding details of wear and tear like grime, cuts, and scrapes, is a lost art on most productions. The easiest place to see the gold standard is in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy. Those costumes aren’t just wonderfully designed, they’re wonderfully destroyed, too. The hobbits’ cloaks start out fresh and beautiful in The Fellowship of the Ring, but by the time Sam and Frodo make it to Mordor they’re torn and faded, with brilliant greens reduced to faded grays by mottled stains set in deep from weeks of sleeping on the ground and trekking through the muck. And the same is true for the clothes of every other character; Aragorn’s leather is worn and tired from years of nomadic adventuring, a strong contrast to the brightness of Legolas’ elven-made gear or Boromir’s quasi-royal Gondorian garb.
It’s striking and gorgeous, the kind of detail that might not immediately stand out, but is an indispensable part of transporting viewers into Middle-earth. It’s also a key reason that the Middle-earth of Prime Video’s The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power feels so off. It’s less immersive and instantly more artificial, inescapably fake with an ever-present awareness that you’re watching actors on sets. This feeling
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