The Lord of The Rings
Yes, I'm cheating again... sort of. I know it's officially three films, but since J. R. R. Tolkien counted it all as one book, I will count the three films as one movie. (I know, it's not a great excuse.) I could have chose two of the films to put on separate parts of this list, but then I'd have had to take another movie off, which I didn't want to do. And I think we all know which part of this movie would have probably not been on my list. That's right! The Two Towers. I'll go through these three volumes and speak as two why they are on the list, and in the second movie's case, why not.
So The Lord of The Rings was a long time in the making. I remember reading about the filming of these films back in 1998, which was a good 3 years before the first film came out! Now keep in mind that all of the films were shot at the same time, and that all three movies are over three hours if you watch the extended versions, and that the shortest film is only one minute under three hours if you watch the theatrical version. Obviously it took a long time to shoot these films. We have to remember how big a production this was. Something like this had never been done before. Most people considered the books to be unfilmable, including the author. An animated film was made in 1978, directed by Ralph Bakshi, which was as close as we came to a real adaptation. Still, that version only went up to halfway through the Two Towers, and it was only two hours long. As you can guess, it's a hard movie to follow as they took out a lot of the story to keep the running time down. The story was later finished in the 1980s with an animated version of Return of The King, this time done by Rankin/Bass... The same company known for Rudolph The Red Nosed Raindeer, Jack Frost, The Little Drummer Boy and other stop-motion Christmas TV classics. It wasn't that great either. Before those films were done, the Beatles were considered to make a version, but that went nowhere after Tolkien said no. Finally, Peter Jackson was able to secure the rights from Chris Tolkien, who now hates the films, and work was begun to find a studio to finance. Miramax was interested, and originally the script was to make the project two films... Too expensive. They wanted one film with a lot of things changed from the book or omitted, such as getting rid of the Helms Deep stuff, getting rid of Saruman, making the Ents stop the capture of Merry and Pippin, etc. Jackson wisely decided to look for another studio, and New Line gladly accepted on the condition that they change the two movie idea into a three movie one, as there were three books. So they completely rewrote the script, and we have the movies we see today.
The first movie was released to enormous fanfare just before Christmas of 2001. We'd seen the teaser trailer of the fellowship coming over the crest of a mountain to the music from Braveheart about a year and a half before Fellowship of The Ring was released. People were really pumped to see this series, and I don't believe I've seen a trailer for a movie come out that early before then, or since then. I suppose this got a lot of people to read the books. (Not me.) I remember seeing the film for the first time. It was at Virginia Center on December 20, at a matinee showing. (I have kept my movie ticket stubs since the summer of 2001, that's how I know.) And it was such an amazing experience, I went back and saw it again on February 2 at another matinee showing. This was the first time since Titanic back in 1997, that I'd seen such an epic film in theaters. I had thought that epics weren't made anymore. That they were a product of the 1960s, and were all about biblical times. I was gladly proved wrong. Not only was it an epic, but it had a great cast! Some were not as well known at the time (at least by general audiences), like Viggo Mortensen, Billy Boyd, Orlando Bloom, and Andy Serkis. However, it had big name stars like Christopher Lee, Ian McKellen, John Rhys-Davies, and Elijah Wood as well. How they paid so many cast members, along with doing all the special effects on a 93 million dollar budget is awe-inspiring. I love the structure of the first film. It starts out so dark in it's prologue, then becomes charming with Bilbo's birthday party, and then slowly gets darker, more exciting, more awe-inspiring and more action oriented as the film goes along. By the end of the film, you feel almost exhausted, just like our heroes. I still find it funny remembering the confusion and irritation of the people in the theater at the end of the movie who were wondering why the movie didn't have an ending... Why it just ended without resolution. How did they not know this was a series? Did they not see the trailers or read about the film? I think it was at this point, at the age of 16 that I realized that there are people out there who are, and always will be, woefully uninformed on everything.
The second film came out around Christmas of 2002; a year after the first film. The critics and audience again loved the film... Until about a year later when people started noticing the film's faults after the third movie came out. Try to watch all three films back to back, and The Two Towers kind of sticks out like a sore thumb. Now, this isn't purely the fault of the writers. Tolkien did not make an adaptation of this book or the following book easy. He had split up the books into different parts, following the differing paths of the now split fellowship. He didn't have one chapter about this group, then one chapter about that one, then back to the first. No, no, no. He did the whole travels of one group, finished that up, then went to the next and so on. You can't make a movie of that. You have to intercut different stories together to form a cohesive narrative. Also the book is very dark, and the action spread thin. The filmmakers actually solved these problems pretty well. The problem is that the film has too much forced humor, at times making Gimli really stupid. He's the only real comic relief in the movie if you don't count Gollum, who was already slightly funny in a different way. Another problem with the film was the epically long battle of Helms Deep. In fact, it was so long and drawn out that I fell asleep during it the second time I saw the film in theaters. (I saw this one three times in under a week.) Again, by the end of the film, you're left drained, and there's little hope in the movie, though it does end on a high note with the victory at Helms Deep and the destruction of Sarumon's tower by the Ents. And may I just mention that Legolas surfing down the stairs during the battle was a bit much? The audience loved it, but I always rolled my eyes at that point.
The third film came out, of course, Christmas of 2003. The second film had beat the first film's box office gross, and the third film would beat the second film's, being one of the first films to cross the billion dollar mark in gross. Not bad for a film shot for 94 million bucks! Remember when big films could be made for that amount? It was only 10 years ago! By this point I was in college at Radford University, and I first saw the film at the movie theater in Christiansburg with my roommate. I was very impressed with Return of The King when it came out. I found it to be a triumphant spectacle of film-making achievement and a moving film. (In fact, the second time I saw the film was ruined by someone shouting 'fags' during Sam and Frodo's reunion at the end of the movie.) I loved how intense the film was, basically just being one big battle separated by Sam and Frodo's little road trip through Mordor. I'd never seen a battle so epic, and I don't think I have since then. It quickly became my favorite of the series, and I still question myself on whether the first film or the third is the best in the series. It had none of the problems the second film had, which even Peter Jackson admits to, and though being the longest of the films, it scarcely feels as long as the second film, either.
So why is the film on my list? Well, anyone who saw the films when they came out remembers how much hype there was around the series. There were documentary specials on TV during those three years, the soundtracks sold really well.... It was my generation's Star Wars trilogy, really. In fact, the debate about which series is better tends to still be fought to this day, though people don't talk about this series as much anymore. The series is still way better than the Star Wars prequels, that's for sure. After The Phantom Menace, we were so glad to see a great film like Fellowship of The Ring! It brought back fantasy film to theaters for a little while, as the Harry Potter series started the same year, and are also spectacular. Sadly, most of the fantasy films that were spawned were not great. Remember the Eragon film? Yeah, neither do I. These films came out in a special time of my life when I first started getting really interested in the making of films. I had had my nervous breakdown in 9th grade and started to look into the making of films when I was homeschooled my 10th grade year, which I count as the year that I got my present personality. (Thank God, as I was a weirdo before then.) The Lord of The Rings was a big step in that journey, and I'll never forget the fun times with friends and family viewing those pictures in theaters back in my teenage years.
*Another note: There isn't as much CGI in these films as you would think. A lot of the stuff is what they call "bigatures", which are miniatures of things like Helms Deep and Minas Tirith. Most guessed those were CGI, so kudos to the film team!
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