LORD OF THE RINGS poll (film version)

reminds me I've been meaning to watch these again... first is the best by a fairly wide margin methinks. I like all that preamble-y stuff.

Two Towers, because I like all of the Rohan stuff.

first by a seriously wide margin indeed. the others have too much peter jackson in them.

the first is the twee-est, the second is the most grungy and battle-heavy, the third is the most "epic". i choose the second.

yeah lolz maybe I like the first the most because its very Bakshi

the third one is the only one with real problems... all those goodbyes...

the second one has that shit where blomps was about to shoot that arrow then grabbed hold of that horse as it was going by and swung himself on DAMN

i feel like the last one maybe?

x-post -- That was easily the biggest 'whoa dude!' moment of all three first time through in the theater.

For all that there's so much of the story to tell after it, the first one builds up to a really stellar climax, the last few minutes just all come together on each front (editing, camera work, acting, music, etc.). So probably that if forced to choose but all of it flows together in my head.

Thought the second one was really boring, and the first one really is just a preamble...so I'll go for the third, despite the neverending endings.

o ya the endings. that was not for me.

the only problem i have with the third are the 2 or 3 scenes where the narrative pauses to recap events via a one-sided dialogue scene or a monologue but i loved the rohan shit too, + miranda otto and brad dourif and bernard hill.

sorry with the second, rather

though maybe it's a problem in the third too, i forget now

The third one because it has bad ass Gandalf and the sweeping shots of the charging Rohan are awesome

I like all the endings but I would.

From China Mieville's recent thoughts on Tolkien, a good argument I hadn't heard before on Jackson leaving out the Scouring of the Shire at the end:

The magic goes west, of course, but there's also the peculiar abjuring of narrative form, in the strange echo after the final battle, the Lord of the Rings's post-end end, the Harrowing of the Shire--so criminally neglected by Jackson. In an alternate reality, this piece of scripting would have earned talented young tattooed hipster video-game designer Johnno Tolkien a slapped wrist from his studio: since when do you put a lesser villain straight after the final Boss Battle? But that's the point. The episode concludes 'well', of course, so far as it goes, but in its very pettiness relative to what's just been, it is brilliantly unsatisfying, ushering in an era of degraded parodies of epics, where it's not just the elves that are going: you can't even get a proper Dark Lord any more.

I think they strained to do that more in the second one because they were truncating a lot of events and jumping around constantly - they felt (perhaps wrongly) that they needed to constantly be reminding the audience of the sequence of events, what was happening concurrently, etc. Which seems really stupid - that's something you can just SHOW, no narration required.

x-posts

Fellowship. I like all the sneaking around.

I was totally pissed that they opted for all those tearful goodbye scenes rather than the Scouring of the Shire, which is a great counterpoint/coda to the central story

The first takes more than an hour to get started, and if you're not a part of the cult (as I am proudly not) it's a serious drag. Then the Black Riders appear, and my heart starts to beat. They're in these films far too infrequently.

I voted for The Return of the King because even a non-cultist like me felt his jaw tremble when the Ring finally melted and during 12 of the 16 resolutions. Also: the big battle in which Ornaldo Bloomps kills those elephant things real good damn is awesome.

i think the presentation of those scenes was okay and while i watch them i feel like it plays more along the lines of one of those "and this is how heavy the burden now is" moments, but their intent is still obvious.

the first one focused a lot more on establishing the atmosphere and showed them walking around the NZ countryside a lot. i find myself putting it on just for the ambiance.

i'm just gonna say this- fuck orlando bloomps surfing down an elephant. fuck him real hard.

mmm yes

Second bcz Frodo was just a statue with giant eye pools in the third and it srsly stresses me out to see Samwise have to deal w/the whole situation.

i ageee with everyone that the scouring of the shire should've been included -- it ends the book's main narrative on such a powerful, creepy, bitter note.

the first one had a way bigger effect on me than any of the others because it totally brought back that heady feeling of reading the books as a pre-teen, when they seemed like the most awesome books ever -- and i still remember sitting in the theater when it suddenly hit me, 'wow, they're really gonna do this RIGHT.' but i'd have to watch these again before i could say which was really 'best.'

mark s (who doesn't seem to post here anymore, sadly) has a great theory about how gollum is the secret hero of the saga, since all the action necessarily revolves around him (hence making him the actual, ahem, "lord of the rings").

the battle in the second one is the most memorable part of any of the three, but yeah probably the first one has more charm.

the third is great too but jesus christ I can remember shifting in my seat through interminable "this feels like the end" scenes, about 20 in a row.

i was always confused with sauron's relationship to the other rings shown in the first film's preamble, maybe a LOTR stan can shed some light?

one ring to rule them all dude. it was a trap.

is it that he made them and gave them to the "MEN" and then he was able to control them as a result with the one ring? that's how I remember it but could be wrong.

x-post yeah

all of these films are incredible. i downloaded the first one on vcd (!) from some ftp site. it was 4 discs and i used to fall asleep with the first disk playing in the background pretty much every night during 2002. so that.

including the scouring of the shire would have been awful.

he created them to bind the leaders of men, dwarfs & elves to him using the secret and powerful 'one ring'? quick recollection.

i still remember sitting in the theater when it suddenly hit me, 'wow, they're really gonna do this RIGHT.'

^^^this. it is very very rare for me to get that rush from any film adaptation.

(particularly one I had always fantasized about as a young'un)

i figured that was the case, just needed to confirm!

Ha yes -- when Sauron's helmet crashed to the ground in the first prologue was when I was fully sold. What a start.

coming on the heels of the star wars prequel it looked even better. and then it kinda made the subsequent matrix flicks look even worse in comparison.

as far as fanboy fodder went

I hate to say it but this thread is missing a little bit of Morbz' haterade

i could make up a batch, tbh

;_;

i was going to say "i don't think morbs has seen these films" but then i remembered it never stopped him before.

Ha yes -- when Sauron's helmet crashed to the ground in the first prologue was when I was fully sold

i mean, this feeling lasted all the way up until the council of elrond, fully halfway through the first of three movies! what an achievement!

Well, I don't give a shit about the mythology, but as far as these kinds of films go they're the best of their kind.

only cos willow doesn't have any sequels, tbh

i keep thinking about the bullet dodged w/r/t the stuart townsend as aragorn casting.

well we still got agent johnson as elrond, to be fair.

yeah Viggo's some perfect casting, they lucked out with him. Actually they lucked out with most of the casting really, I can't recall anyone who's certifiably bad. John Rhys Davies maybe.

blanchett!

i don't think there's a single bad performance in the trilogy. gimli could have been played as more than what he mostly was (comic relief) but considering everything he was fine.

aragorn in the rankin/bass 'return of the king'

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/a/a3/ROTKTVAragorn.jpg

I have the Blu-ray box which I think looks pretty damn good. The entire series really holds up visually, it’s kind of amazing how much worse The Hobbit movies look, let alone the uncanny valley CGI of The Rings of Power.

Yeah, I honestly think the key thing w/r/t the LOTR/Hobbit collapse on the technical front was a percentage flipflop between on-site locations/practical sets and pure greenscreen -- it just shows -- but also LOTR used all those practical miniatures to the damn full, but I don't even think they did any for the Hobbit. Kinda nuts. (As for ROP, feh.)

there were plenty of ways the Hobbit could have been wonderful with a more disciplined and intelligent approach, it just felt like bringing an even more oppressive grimness to the material, grimmer even than LOTR for being so unearned, was so far off base. as for ROP, even if someone told me next season was actually brilliant and I should watch it....

https://media.tenor.com/2bFG2tD8PYAAAAAC/lord-of-the-rings-rings-of-power.gif

i wont surprise anyone by saying that a lot of the effects -especially anything light/bright?- have aged v badly imo and stand out a mile watching at home.

the army of the dead sequences, in particular, always seem several cuts below a lot of the rest. theyre straight out of the frighteners and not in any good way.

gollum often a marvel but sometimes a prollum, prollum.

oh hi I am a lifelong Tolkien fanatic/pedant and I am watching these movies in 20-minute chunks for the first time as part of neurofeedback therapy sessions. probably halfway through the 2nd one now?

pros: lots of good lines, obv "fly, you fools" but I particularly appreciated "all will love me and despair". Nazgul are suitably rendered.

cons: I can understand leaving out Tom Bombadil, but I am pissed about the Rangers of Ithilien and the aforementioned Scouring, I mean wtf. at least we got the dead faces in the marsh, and the giant statues.

not looking forward to the endless goodbyes also described above.

unimpressed with the Ents and Gollum so far tbh, the orcs are pretty well rendered.

the inn at Bree and some (most) of the Moria stuff are my faves so far I think, Pippin making noise was suitably overdone.

also liked Bilbo growing fangs etc as he flared up with ring-desire one last time.

(I saw the Bakshi film on release, but these seemed way too blockbuster for me when they came out and I just never got around to them)

turns out I apparently confused these with the Jackson Hobbit movies ;)

currently our intrepid party-of-the-moment has arrived at Edoras, now reinforced by newly white Gandalf and Shadowfax (I appreciated that shoutout as well). I get to see another installment tomorrow!

still can't believe Faramir was robbed, wtf

I am glad you are finally learning about it all. May I direct you to our old podcast episodes on them when you're all caught up etc.

I'm still annoyed that I missed yr thing in Portland!

nor sure what versions I am watching here, will try to note the timestamp when TT ends

Funny, the last time I watched these the effects seemed fine to me. As always the clever use of practical effects and in-camera tricks have helped these movies age better than many of their all-FX ilk. If anything, "The Hobbit" showed how advances in technology can make things worse; everything from the Marvel movies to (the clips and commercials I have seen for) "Wicked" have paid a price for all that money spent.

I'm imagining Shelob animated by Ray Harryhausen now

the endless goodbyes are good imo

The Galadriel transformation is a nice example of an effect which seems a bit cheap and rough, but works pretty well.

oh dear no, no no no

Huh. I like that Frighteners-type stuff, it's a lot better than some lame CGI morph deal.

The Galadriel effect was 50% silly, 50% memorably upsetting in the theater. It's a good reminder that every effect in these films was made knowing it would be seen printed to 35mm, with grain and big-screen presentation helping to massage all composites or any lack of detail in the CGI bits.

Rewatched all of these in the past year with the kids. Some of the effects are definitely showing their age but there was nothing that distracted from the story. An amazing accomplishment.

Iirc in that video I posted the claim was that they scanned all the FX separately in 4K for that most recent release, which in turn made the FX look faker. Reminds me of when "War of the Worlds" was released on DVD and people could really notice the wires. A lot of studios have been leaning hard on the digital noise reduction as well, applied to reduce grain and other alleged image imperfections but often overshooting and making the picture look *too* good (which is to say, not good). Reminds me of when they first used a digital scan to clean up Miles' "Kind of Blue" and the program reportedly thought the sound of brushes on the drums was static.

I love the Galadriel transformation bit. A big part of it is just the simple and effective use of the audio, similarly deployed earlier in the film on Gandalf's "Do not take me for some conjurer of cheap tricks!" line.

I found a full set of blu rays in the thrift store the other day for dirt cheap, but I didn't buy them because I wasn't sure if they were the Sickly Green Edition or not. Long ago, I had the full DVD set of the extended editions. I sold them when I was broke, and wish I hadn't.

Iirc it's only the extended "Fellowship" that has the green tint. Some people say they can't even notice it, I guess without a comparison it's less conspicuous.

It's pretty remarkable, how different a movie can look from edition to edition. And the green tint in "Fellowship," for example, there is still debate as to whether it was intentional (per Jackson) or a mistake. If it was a mistake in a "director approved" transfer, how did that happen? If it was intentional ... why? Why just that film, and why just the extended version? (The theatrical versions reportedly all still look good.) It should all be relatively straight forward, so my guess is that budgets have just been cut so much they don't really care to do it right. But then, there are high profile restorations that apparently still engender debate, especially when it comes to 4K transfers. It's almost as if no one knows or remembers what these movies were ever supposed to look like in the first place. Like, I was reading about a relatively recent (2017) 4K transfer of "Chinatown," and no less than Robert Harris was saying it was the best the movie has ever looked. And then others countered by saying, no, the standard blu-ray looked better. Now, Harris is a pro, a restoration legend, and they are all movie snobs, so who is right?

maybe it's like how some people think cilantro tastes like garbage

Honestly, it seems like lots of people don't notice this kind of stuff at all. I have seen people's tvs set up with motion smoothing on and the colours all wrong and when I mention it, they find if weird that I notice or am bothered by any of it.

*they find it weird*

yeah, that stuff is odd. like, an image can be obviously stretched or fitted improperly, or the motion smoothing can make everything look dull as shit, and people just leave it on.

oh hell yes we got the Rangers and Faramir, with bonus Osgiliath and Haradrim mentions.

had also forgotten abt the wolves of Isengard who were fucking badass

(they may not have actually said "Haradrim"? regardless, good stuff)

currently I am at 1:54:00 in TT, tune in next week lol

the whole scene where the Rangers almost shot (& then captured) Gollum was very well done, I like that they are really working with the Smeagol/Gollum duality struggle

the little fish song! I had forgotten abt that too

dude writes some bops

so the next 40 minutes I watched were basically "the Battle of Helm's Deep" with a side of Ents and a dash of Rangers

A few too many shots of scared Rohirrim children for sure

The scene with the Orcs blowing up the wall totally ruled, this is the shit I come to blockbuster movies for

Legolas surfing down the stairs was a bit much, I gather this continues to be an issue

Things I don't remember from the books: the Aragorn death fake-out, the Rangers taking Frodo/SamGollum to Osgiliath

I appreciated that they took a moment to play up how slow the Ents are to decide anything.

One thing that doesn’t happen in the books is the enormous number of death fake outs. The Aragorn one definitely doesn’t happen. Faramir is more of a chill guy in the novels as well, less the sullen younger brother and more avuncular and willing to let the hobbits carry on with their journey.

yeah that was my memory of Faramir, ty for confirming - he was a favorite of mine as a kid

currently at 2:34:00 as the angry Ents stride towards Isengard, still not sure if this is the extended version or not

Extra footage is mostly gratuitous boobs, iirc.

hmm def haven't seen anything like that

I think the pointless Osgiliath sidestep is only in the extended cut? Also Aragorn riding a wolf off a cliff. Could be wrong. NED!

currently at 2:34:00 as the angry Ents stride towards Isengard, still not sure if this is the extended version or not

― sleeve, Friday, March 14, 2025 3:55 PM (ten minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

the last march of the ents is my favorite part of the film trilogy. When you’ve pissed the trees off, you know you done fucked up.

mine too
when one ent on fire puts it out in a little pond is so wonderful

I think the pointless Osgiliath sidestep is only in the extended cut? Also Aragorn riding a wolf off a cliff. Could be wrong. NED!

The design of the ents was the only thing that sorta let me down about these movies. I’ve never read the books so my opinion is relatively worthless here, but they looked so spindly and…. I dunno. I imagined something more majestic.

The two towers extended cut includes some extra stuff between Aragorn and Eowyn on the journey to Helm’s Deep including establishing just how old he is and how much her cooking sucks, some extra flashbacks revolving around Arwen, the Uruk-hai army uh retreating into the forest at the end of the battle, etc.

theres def a lot more osgiliath section in extended also

arahorn warg fight ciffhanger is possibly the low point of the jackson transgressions, that and any CGI legolas moments

WARG thank u I was trying to remember and only coming up with 'dire wolf"

yeah I'm def watching extended, I remember the Arwen flashback

so back to this again after a diversion, 40 minutes into Return now

Pippin fucks up, again

again they are really playing up Gollum's internal struggle, I like it

cool shots of Minas Tirith

oh Arwen again?! I forget all this from the books but now I'm thinking she comes back for good? We'll see.

glowing green Minas Morgul firing off the power blast signal was rad

film Minas Morgul was modeled after the Silver Legacy in Reno.

poor Frodo is looking pretty haunted this time around