3 Movies That Put Insane Detail into Stuff You Never Noticed

There’s Evey’s (Natalie Portman’s) name: “E” is the fifth letter of the alphabet, “V” is the fifth letter if you’re counting backward and “Y” is the 25th letter (five squared). Finch, who later helps V, has exactly five letters in his name. When V attacks the villain Creedy (whose name is also replete with “E”s and “Y”s), Beethoven’s 5th just happens to be playing in the background.

2. Shaun of the Dead: Full of Zombie Easter EggsShaun of the Dead is an unapologetic homage to every zombie/horror movie and video game ever made. If you’ve seen it, you probably already know that there are hidden jokes throughout (for example, if you listen carefully to the news reports that play in the background, they mention things like the Rage virus from 28 Days Later and a crashed probe from Night of the Living Dead). But that’s barely scratching the surface, so let’s move past the obvious references and go straight for the “so impossibly obscure they shouldn’t have bothered” stuff.

For instance, when Shaun walks into a local shop to buy an ice cream, you can faintly hear the DJ on an Indian music station announce that the dead are coming back to life … in Hindi!

And, remember the restaurant Shaun tries to book a table at, the one that you can’t read the name of unless you pause it like we did? It’s called Fulci’s, a reference to famed Italian horror director Lucio Fulci.And Mary, the zombie in the garden that gets impaled on a pipe? If you freeze-frame at exactly the right moment, you can see from her name tag that she works at a place called Landis, which is a reference to An American Werewolf in London director John Landis.

Did you ever wonder why Shaun owned so many vinyl records and had such a predilection for techno music? Well wonder no more, because if you look over Shaun’s shoulder during this scene, you will see a poster that says “Shaun Smiley Riley” on it, alluding to the fact that Shaun used to be a DJ, as well as telling you his full name, something that is never mentioned in the film itself.

3. The Lord of the Rings: Each Piece of Armor Has a Backstory

For any sci-fi or fantasy film, it’s one thing to make the clothing and equipment look authentic onscreen, and another to add layers of detail that are physically impossible to notice, even if each frame of the movie is examined with a magnifying glass. For instance, in The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, when you watched the massive Battle of Helm’s Deep and the tens of thousands of bad guys storming the fortress, did you notice the handcrafted chain mail they were wearing?What’s that? You didn’t, because it was a massive crowd and the entire scene was filmed at night, in the rain? And because the mail is what they were wearing under their armor, so that only a few inches of it shows even if you freeze-frame on an individual soldier?

Hmm… that chain mail that you didn’t notice, that you couldn’t have noticed, was created by the costume department by hand, link by link …… working for two straight years, without stopping. They made 6 miles of the stuff (32,000 feet of it) this way, to lay unseen under the armor of the warriors of Middle-earth.

However, to truly appreciate the completely unreasonable level of detail director Peter Jackson insisted upon, you need to look at all of the armor and weapons featured in the films. Each race has specific traits and customs, and then within those races, each family has their own designs that are reflected in the equipment they wear. To quote the article sourced above:

Freeze on a scene in the Elf land of Rivendell and appreciate the bronze detailing of Legolas’ quiver, crafted with the lost-wax process. Pause in an Orc battle scene and notice the varieties of helmets, some representing a family’s standing within the Orcan culture, others illustrating that Orcs were scavengers who gathered armor and weapons that were dropped on battlefields. Stop on a closeup of a Dwarf and observe the belt buckles with squarish, angular designs that reflect Dwarven architecture.All right, let’s just take a look and judge for ourselves. For starters, here’s Legolas’ quiver, which you might briefly have noticed during some blurry split-second shot of his back:OK, that is admittedly a ton of detail, but that’s for a main character. Legolas probably has six hours of screen time in the entire trilogy, of course you would want his gear to look great. But the idea that the Orc armies all had different armor that represented “a family’s standing within the Orcan culture”? Why? Because Peter Jackson is insane, that’s why. Behold what the masses of anonymous arrow fodder were wearing:More than 48,000 pieces just as detailed as these were made for the first film alone, to please the four people in the audience who would notice/care. And even crazier, each one of these helmets has a backstory like a G.I. Joe filecard — rough leather and cracked metal for Orcs of low standing, long and misshapen for Orcs with (more) physical deformities; light helmets for scouts, and heavy bladed ones for berserkers. All this effort just to be strapped onto an anonymous stuntman as he sprints toward a bludgeoning with prop swords.