Lord of the Rings
For anyone who has been living under a rock for the past few years, this is a trilogy of movies based on J.R.R. Tolkein's books. It's the mother of all adventures. It's set in Middle- Earth, a fantastical version of medieval Europe. Okay let me try to sum all three four hour movies. There's a ring, it's evil, because it was made by Sauron (king of evil), who was defeated thousands of years ago. The one chance they had to destroy the ring failed so there's still evil in the world of Middle-Earth. The One Ring eventually comes to Frodo, a Hobbit. He has to bring the Ring to the Elves before the Nazgūl/ Ring Wraiths get him. He does but the Elves are powerless so he continues on his way to Mount Doom to destroy it. He takes with him his three Hobbit friends Sam, Merry and Pippin, the Elf Legolas (yummy Orlando Bloom), the Ranger/Dunčdain/heir to the thrown of Gondor Strider/Aragorn/Estel and so on (mmm Viggo Mortensen), the son of the steward of Gondor, Boromir (yay Sean Bean!), a Dwarf Gimli and the wizard Gandalf.
So they travel through Middle-Earth, going over and under mountains, battling orcs and goblins, all in the hopes of destroying the Ring. Unfortunately the Ring has a mind of it's own and, like all inanimate yet sentient things, it doesn't want to be destroyed. It slowly starts corrupting the people around it and Boromir attacks Frodo. Because of this Frodo decides to go off on his own, but Sam follows. The two of them meet up with a schizophrenic creature suffering from multiple personality disorder, called Gollum or Smeagol. He used to be a Hobbit, and the former owner of the Ring, but it corrupted him and gave him a long life to corrupt him even more.
Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli go off to try and rescue Merry and Pippin. They go into the land of Rohan. The king has been taken over by Saruman, the evil wizard. Freeing him they fight a giant battle at Helm's Deep, a Rohan stronghold. Then they lead the Rohan to Gondor to fight back even more orcs and Urukai to save the world of men. While this is happening Frodo, Sam and Gollum make their way to Mordor and to Mount Doom. And after 12 hours the power of friendship wins out and the Ring is cast into the fires of Mount Doom and the world is saved.
Hey, that wasn't as bad as I thought it would be. I thought it would go on forever.
I LOVE these movies!!! I wouldn't call them my all time favorite movies, but they were close. First of all, although I did not read the books first (well I read The Hobbit, but never managed to get through the first book) I did read them after the first movie. Unlike Harry Potter where they are retelling the book, Lord of the Rings the movie is like a companion to the books. They obvious couldn't do everything in the movie or there would have been a fourth movie, they condensed it down to a very understandable, excellent adventure movie.
The important thing to know is that the important theme in these films is friendship. That's what I enjoyed most: Frodo was not a big, strong, imposing, super intelligent hero. He was as flawed as any of us. And he couldn't succeed on his own, he needed his friend to help him. It was because of Sam that the Ring was destroyed. It shows that you don't have to be the best a everything, you just have to be the best you can be and make sure someone always has your back.
I also loved the richness of the films. Just watching the movies brings you right into Middle-Earth. The details of the sets and costumes blew me away. It's very often that the production crew gets forgotten in movie and in theatre, but I feel if you can forget that they even did something then they did their job right. It is when there is a mistake in the set or costumes when you think to yourself 'Oh someone screwed up there'. But if its done correctly its no longer a 'set' it is a 'world' it not a 'costume' its 'clothes'. I can't remember once while watching The Lord of the Rings ever thinking 'Wow what an awesome set', it was more along the lines of 'I want that castle'.
I really loved the acting in this movie. I loved it that they went with the quality of the actor and the not their popularity. Saying that, couldn't they have found someone else to play Arwen besides Liv Tyler. I've never liked her as an actress, and to have her playing a terrible character is even worse .You have no idea how glad I am that she was taken out of the Battle of Helm's Deep. I know she was put in to appease feminists, saying they needed a strong female character, but she wasn't even in the freaking books! I didn't go see this movie for the crappy romantic storyline. I went to go see it to watch Viggo killing ugly guys with a sword. If you wanted to show strong women maybe you shouldn't have had them all hiding in a cave while the ground is falling in around their ears.
There were a few other problems I had with the movies. Slight ones, barely worth mentioning, but I will anyway. There was at least once during each movie where there was one bad CGI effect, usually involving Legolas. I know they wanted to show how superior Elves were to Humans, because they are, but they still made me flinch. (Yes I flinch at bad CGI, I know I'm weird.)
There were these scenes during extended Two Towers DVD that, for the life of me, I can't figure out why they were removed from the original release. Without the dialogue between Faramir and Denethor Faramir's character didn't make any sense. He just looked as corruptible as his brother Boromir, which he wasn't; he was trying to please his father (Denethor) and thought the Ring would show him how capable he truly was.
Hugo Weaving freaks me out. I don't know why, there's something about his face, but he scares me. Galadriel also bothered me. I can't give any reasons behind why I didn't like Elrond or Galadriel but I didn't. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that Elrond gave up even before the war started. The Elves were sailing west and his mind was already there. The time of the Elves were over, he said so himself, they were leaving, so it didn't matter to him what happened to Middle-Earth. Sure they sent Elves to Helm Deep, but did he go? Did she? Two of the three most powerful Elves and they all they cared about was heading west.
That brings me to the next thing that I found strange. If Aragorn is a Ranger, the leader of the Rangers I might add, where the hell were the rest of the Rangers!? In the books it was the Rangers that showed up at Helm's Deep not the Elves. Okay there were two Elves with them (Elrond's twin son's Elladan and Elrohir), but you see what I'm getting at. It seemed weird to me that there are no other Rangers in Middle-Earth. Maybe Peter Jackson thought it would be confusing to have more characters just pop up out of nowhere, but I found it strange.
One last thing. In all the 100 endings they couldn't show Legolas and Gimli sailing west after Aragorn dies? I'm not sure but I think Merry and Pippin go with them. Would that have been so hard? They didn't even need a dialogue. We could've just seen them sail away.
Okay, besides those minute details. I loved these movies. The good times outweighs the bad ones by like a hundred to one. I mean there are such awesome scenes in this movie that just make you smile from ear to ear, (when Merry and Pippin fool around with the fireworks; when Sam lifts Frodo onto his shoulder to carry him up Mount Doom) or want to make you cry (Boromir's death scene) that such little things like Arwen don't seem as bad.
LOTR: FOTR: 8.5/10 LOTR: TTT: 9.5/10 LOTR: ROTK: 9.5/10