Re: The Lord Of The Rings trilogy [official mega-thread]

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ok, i just spent some time finding every LOTR-related thread i could find on this site and merging them all into one big megathread. seemed logical, now that they're all complete and are truly a trilogy.

was prompted by my desire to post this interesting piece:
CHUD wrote:THE DEVIN'S ADVOCATE: REMEMBERING THE UNLIKELIEST BLOCKBUSTER

Perhaps the funniest thing about the upcoming film version of The Hobbit is the fact that everybody knows it's going to be a huge blockbuster success. It's just more or less obvious that the pending duology will be major hits at the box office and earn rivers of cash. And maybe, just maybe, even a couple of Oscars.

But if you were to go back in time just ten years and say that The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, directed by the guy who brought us the little-seen splatter film Dead Alive and the little-seen box office bomb The Frighteners, would go on to be one of the biggest money earners in history and win a record-tying eleven Oscars... well, even the innocent young geeks on the CHUD message boards would have laughed at you.

I've been rewatching The Lord of the Rings films recently; it turns out my girlfriend hadn't seen them and that made me realize I hadn't revisited them in years - since the Extended Edition of Return of the King hit, in fact. That was just five years ago, but it feels like a lifetime in cinema terms. Since then Peter Jackson disappointed many of us with a bloated King Kong and has been at work with a very expensive version of The Lovely Bones. The Hobbit has been stewing for a long time, in a couple of different iterations and with pre-production only just getting fully underway now. And the cinematic landscape feels like it's changed in so many ways, as though we've all dropped a couple of IQ points.

And indeed, the idea of a trilogy like The Lord of the Rings not only being a success but a blockbuster of historic proportions seems impossible today. But the truth is that this series was always a ridiculous proposition, and that it probably should go down in history as the most unlikely cinematic success story ever.

Right from the start the entire project should have been doomed: straight sword and sorcery fantasy has never been a big draw for crowds. While smaller films have done good business with high fantasy playing to B-movie houses, the genre seems to have never hit with the masses. The film that was the previous highest grossing high fantasy success, Willow, wasn't much of a success at all, never launching the franchise that George Lucas and Ron Howard would have liked.

The popularity of Tolkiens's books certainly made the films a not completely ludicrous proposition; 100 million copies have been sold, and The Lord of the Rings has been estimated as one of the most read books in America today. But book popularity doesn't always cross over to movie popularity, especially when it comes to a series as niche as Tolkien's dense and wordy tale of the War of the Ring.

Watching The Lord of the Rings again I was struck by just how faithful Jackson was the to spirit of the world Tolkien created, even if he deviated enough to infuriate the diehards. It's hard to imagine that the crowds who made Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen a huge hit this summer sat in theaters five years ago and listened to three hours of people rambling on in very formal, semi-poetic English, but the numbers indicate a very good number of them must have.

We live in a cinematic world where everything must be overexplained and overmythologized; Batman can't just have a Batsuit, we have to spend time learning why he has it, what it's made of, how he paid for it, and who helped him make it. The Lord of the Rings goes almost the opposite direction; moviegoers who didn't have the books in hand stood the serious chance of being overwhelmed by the constant parade of names, places, beasts and races. Jackson smartly makes sure that the onscreen action is always clear - in the lead up to the battle of Helms Deep in The Two Towers he has at least three different montages or flashbacks explaining who is where and why - but the background material is just there. No one stops and gives a big speech about just what a Balrog is, for instance.

Part of the faithfulness he brought includes playing everything with an incredibly straight face. All of this stuff is completely silly, and much of what isn't silly is preposterous. There is some comedic relief - again, more than the diehards would have liked - but the three films take themselves seriously in a way that few blockbusters do. While a movie like Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen takes itself seriously in an overwrought way, The Lord of the Rings takes itself seriously in a very earnest way. Michael Bay thinks he's telling a Campbellian uberstory where the characters are pawns to be shifted around but Jackson takes the material seriously on the character level - this stuff matters to us because it matters to these characters, not because what is happening fulfills a myth story arc.

And that's really where I find myself surprised that these films connected. The whole thing stands right on the precipice of self-parody - you could call the joke version Lord of the Endless Helicopter Shots - and yet somehow the hardened, ADD suffering cynical audiences didn't erupt in laughter. They erupted in tears and cheers.

There's something to be said about the trilogy's timing. Had The Lord of the Rings hit around the time of The Phantom Menace and The Matrix I don't think it would have went over as well. If it had hit a few years later, in the time of the first Transformers, I also think it would have stumbled. But The Fellowship of the Ring came out right after 9/11, and the film's thematic concepts of a decent way of life being threatened by a huge, shadowy threat rang very true. I spent New Year's Eve of 2001/2002 at a late night screening of The Fellowship of the Ring with my then-girlfriend, and I remember sitting in that theater wondering if at midnight the next wave of Al Qaeda madness would come (yeah, yeah, laugh if you want but the months after 9/11 were fucking weird for those of us in New York City). That night Gandalf's response to Frodo's wish that the ring had never been found - 'So do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us.' - was weighted with serious meaning that Peter Jackson hadn't intended and that Tolkien had intended for another war in another decade. The unjust invasion of Iraq was still some time away and the operations in Afghanistan carried the feeling of righteousness.

The Lord of the Rings came out at that moment when irony was dialed down a little bit (despite the claims at the time it never died) and earnestness wasn't just ok, it was embraced. Most of our modern action heroes are the unwilling sort, the guy who is called to battle despite the fact that he would rather stay home. The hobbits of The Lord of the Rings were the unlikely sort, but very willing. Each of them made a choice to step into a larger world and to put their lives on the line for justice; Tolkien doesn't spend any time with bullshit 'Refusing the Call' nonsense that litters too many of our films aimed at complacent mall audiences. These hobbits would certainly have preferred to stay home and toke up on pipeweed, but they never hesitated to stand up and risk themselves in fundamental ways to protect their home, their beliefs and their friends. You'd get laughed out of the room if you pitched Michael Bay on the idea of having Sam Witwicky simply opt to be a warrior against the Decepticons. Even Captain Kirk had to be talked into taking up the reins of duty (although Star Trek reflects an Obama-era return to a sense of earnestness, one that looking at our president's current track record will likely be very short lived).

The thing that a revisit of The Lord of the Rings gave me was a sense of optimism about movie audiences. It's too easy to despair when empty meaningless blockbusters earn billions while smart, small movies languish in obscurity, but Peter Jackson proved that mainstream audiences wouldn't just go for something rich and dense and thoughtful and emotional and meaningful, they would rabidly eat it up. While Jackson offered up spectacular battle scenes and incredible vistas, he didn't turn Tolkien's books into action films; you have to sit through lots of talking and walking and gorgeous shots of landscapes to get to moments where orcs get their heads cut off. With one exception* Jackson and his team didn't need to introduce made up conflict in the relationships between the characters. They loved each other - very expressively, I might add - and they fought bravely and sacrificed completely for each other.

Where it made me despair a little, to be honest, was in the realization that no one has yet topped Gollum as a CGI character. At the time of the release of The Two Towers I stumped for Andy Serkis to get an Oscar nomination for his amazing performance (no, I didn't think I had influence. You just have to speak up sometimes), and I don't believe I've seen another CGI performance since that deserves the same kind of consideration. Gollum still looks incredible, but you can see the seams in the computer rendering... at least until Serkis' performance takes over and you stop caring. I was more fooled by the physical realism of Davey Jones in the latter Pirates of the Caribbean movies, but I have never been more fooled by the humanity and emotional realism of a computer assisted performance. The technology has improved, but it seems like no one else has really done anything that noteworthy with it.

When Return of the King racked up an impressive eleven Oscars there was a sense that it was winning for the entire trilogy, and that the Academy was rewarding Jackson et al for their achievement in bringing a previously unfilmable world to life. But the real achievement wasn't in filming The Lord of the Rings, it was in making The Lord of the Rings a movie that worked for mainstream audiences without every seriously compromising what made it great and beloved in the first place.

*Frodo turning on Sam in The Return of the King

Re: The Lord Of The Rings trilogy [official mega-thread]

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decided to rewatch the trilogy before the series comes out. started last night with FOTR extended version. even as "extended" as it is, there are some gaps in plot/logic that they breeze right by. had to pause and explain to my wife why certain things were happening, etc. not a show stopper, but just noticeable. and man, some of the CGI did not age well. that being said, this really was a fantastic effort at filming this tale. some great filmmaking on display here, and a quite engaging story. hard to believe it was over 20 years ago this came out. looking forward to the next chapter.

Re: The Lord Of The Rings trilogy [official mega-thread]

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completed the extended edition of The Two Towers last night. still some not great CGI present, but not nearly as much as FOTR. most of the time, i was marveling at how in the hell they actually made this. it had to take forever to create these sets/scenes in pre-production, and the epic scale/scope accomplished is quite staggering. to the point where i started to realize that is the movie. if you could somehow disregard the action, the sets, the animation, etc., these characters are not great. nearly everyone is one-note and entirely two-dimensional. no screen time was spent giving much depth to anyone besides smeagol, aragorn (barely), and faramir. it seems like really, these movies could have been 2h longer, each of them. but would that have made them "better"? probably less enjoyable as a stand-alone movie. then i started drawing parallels between this and the last couple seasons of game of thrones. certainly GoT wouldn't have existed without these films being so successful. the difference is that GoT spent several seasons building out characterization, making us fall in love with them, before completely abandoning that tract and going mach 5 from guidepost to guidepost. that jarring difference is what made me really not like the last couple seasons. in the long-form format of an episodic series, spending that time with characters is what makes it work. if it had been mach 5 the entire time, no one would have given a shit and it would have been a completely forgettable show. in a feature film on the scale of LOTR, you simply don't have time to do something like that and keep it a "reasonable" run time or an enjoyable stand-alone film. that's why LOTR gets the pass here. even though these films are 4h long, very little of that time was spent building any depth to any of the characters outside of the main two or three - it was spent trying to explain the why of the action, which is quite necessary. but a show doesn't get that pass. there's no excuse for such a massive shift in tone and approach. anyway, my point is, i really didn't give a shit about any of these characters. when aragorn fell off the cliff and was presumed dead, i shrugged and moved right along to the next thing with the film. didn't really feel anything. just marveled at what was on the screen, not who. that's the risk they took, but goddamn did it work. jackson really straddled the line between being faithful to the tomes and creating a massive, epic fantasy trilogy for the ages. on one hand, it felt like a throw-back approach, like the huge hollywood epics of ages past. on the other, it was only possible because of the technological advances of CGI and motion capture.

another seemingly hypocritical paradox here are my feelings on The Hobbit, where he took one book and turned it into several films. it felt bloated and draggy compared to these. of course, he was trying to build out some character depth, really pull people into the story. but it kind of backfired. he had already given us the mach 5 action-fantasy trilogy of LOTR, which is still unmatched 20 years later. switching gears and artificially elongating content rather than cutting content just felt weird.

point is, when i compare how i feel about other similar properties, it seems like i shouldn't really like these films. but jackson really did something unique here and somehow pulled it all together, hitting mostly all the right notes while telling enough of the story to make some kind of sense. it's really quite staggering and impressive. one in a million that it works, and he did it. looking forward to ROTK.

Re: The Lord Of The Rings trilogy [official mega-thread]

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finished up the trilogy with the extended version of Return Of The King. really fantastic conclusion to this epic saga. once again i'm struck by how well they just move from massive set piece to massive set piece but still keep you interested and engaged with just enough characterization. i realize that the Tolkein estate had nothing to do with these films and I guess were upset about how thin the films were compared to the books, something about stripping the humanity out of them. i can see that POV, but once again, what makes a good movie isn't necessarily page-for-page translation. without these films, there is no GOT. they essentially recreated an entire genre of big budget fantasy, which i'm here for. apparently the Tolkein estate is heavily involved in the Amazon series, so we'll see if that is a good thing or not very soon.