mrmyth said:
The thing people seem to be missing about FOTR is that it got to us first.
I'm sorry, but no. It's been what, almost 4 years since FOTR came out, and 1.5 since ROTK? I think we've all had time to think about the movies for their own worth. TTT and ROTK were far weaker, for a number of reasons. This isn't to say comedic aspects are necessarily bad, but they were better integrated and more natural in Fellowship, while they seemed more forced in the others, and at very inopportune moments. In Fellowship, when the shit hit the fan, the comedy stopped, and that was a good thing.
Before I enumerate some complaints, let me state first and foremost that I don't care whether it was in the books or not. There is no relation between the quality of these films and their faithfulness to Tolkien's novels. It's an irrelevant point because the films have to stand on their own in a different medium. Besides, I read the books when I was in third grade, loved them, and had forgotten almost all of the specifics by the time the films came out. My complaints aren't based in whether the films were faithful or not. In fact, if anything, a big complaint is that Jackson was faithful in areas where he shouldn't have been.
1) The horrible comedy involving Gimli and Legolas. Some people have already touched on this, but it was atrocious and most inappropriate during Helm's Deep. It was too slapstick and ruined any atmosphere the battle had. These two idiots joking around simply negated the great mood that the battle could have had.
2) TTT and ROTK had far more extensive and ambitious effects sequences, and I don't think they were pulled off as well. It seemed like Weta was underfunded, spread too thin and/or given too little time to put everything together. Every shot of an actor riding or being carried by a digital creature looked horrible. Legolas attacking and surfing all over that elephant thing? *shudder* The Ents carrying Merry and Pippen? That had to be some of the worst blue/green screen compositing I've seen in ages. All of the movies occasionally suffered from this, but ROTK more than the rest, but the dreaded 'off' feeling between live-action elements and backgrounds during camera movements (classic example is AOTC when Mace, Yoda and Obi-Wan are walking down the transparent hallway). Even further, too many of these camera movements seemed designed solely to show off weak effects. Lots of really lame twisting crane shots of Frodo and Sam scurrying up mountains in order to show CGI elements of castles and ground forces, when the combination just looked goofy. To be fair, I'm not saying Fellowship's effects were perfect either, but they were less extensive and abundant, so problems were less in your face.
This is a lesser complaint, but the poor effects often ripped me from the movie. I felt like I was watching The Mummy Returns again at some points.
3) Arbitrary plot points. I know this is sort of a fantasy staple, but I absolutely cannot stand these amazing coincidences that happen in fantasy. The big one that annoyed me was when Elrond shows up, gives Aragorn the magical sword or whatever and then tells him that he's just so happened to have stopped his army by a secret ghost army that only that sword can command. I was just sitting there like, maybe this worked in the book when I was 8 years old, but it's dumb as hell now. Oh my, Aragorn's going up against impossible odds and he just happened to stumble upon an invincible ghost army that only he can recruit. Wow, shock and awe. That kind of storytelling is simply not engaging. There were too many of these moments where the right thing happened at the right time due to external forces (as opposed to real proactive choices by the main characters) acting on the story.
4) Finally, and most of all, Peter Jackson obviously doesn't have a fucking clue how to juggle multiple storylines. The Two Towers was disgusting. He wasn't consistent at all in how he handled switching between the different character arcs. It was neither temporally consistent nor consistent with the overall story movement. The film jumped from all kinds of different times for each storyline that it was sometimes confusing, but mostly just jarring. There were basically three parallel stories but it seemed to me that Jackson just compressed them onto one track without regard to how they moved at different paces. It was like he simply decided only so much time could be spent with each group and then they had to move to the next, even if it inconvenienced the story. The Battle of Helm's Deep was ruined, not just by the horrible comedy and goofy actions by the main trio, but by how it kept cutting to the other storylines. Any time the suspence, dread and tension was really building, Jackson would cut from the battle to some trees talking real slowly. Then we'd go back. The constantly changing pace and tempo of the film was just too much, and inevitably the entire thing collapsed and I wasn't invested in any of the storylines.
The end should have been like this. Establish the armies coming to Helm's Deep and the humans preparing for battle. Cut to Merry and Pippen with the Ents and go through that until the Ents decide not to help. Handle the stuff with Frodo before the chaos erupts. You could even cut between that stuff (if only to cut down on the boredom with the Ents), but get to those story points and then switch gears. Show the entire Helm's Deep battle at once. All in one glorious building romp that really lets the audience feel the ebb and flow of the humans' plight. Then go to Frodo, and show his story and the escape with Sam and Gollum. Then cut to the Ents finding the destroyed trees and going berserk on Saruman. I can't remember if there were any little epilogues to everyone's story, but show those here too. The end.
5) There was little sense of danger to the main characters in TTT and ROTK. In Fellowship, we see Frodo get severely wounded, Gandalf seemingly dies and Boromir sacrifices himself. There was a real sense that these guys weren't invincible. Then in TTT we've got Aragorn, Gimli and Legolas diving right into the main attack force at Helm's Deep and just idly swinging away as if they were invincible and knew it. I had a hard time feeling anything for these guys when the movie presented them as well, superheroes that couldn't be touched.
6) ROTK's ending. I don't know about the rest of you, but at some point in these films I stopped caring about the characters and instead only really cared about the goal, which was destroying the ring. There was a decent amount of emphasis on how the characters, specifically Frodo, were sacrificing their lives for this goal, and I came not care whether they lived or died, as long as the goal was accomplished.
That was what was important. So when the ring was destroyed, I lost all interest in the rest of the story. I didn't care that Samwise magically got a wife in order to counteract all the homosexual moves he kept putting on Frodo during the previous nine hours of film. At most I needed to see Aragorn officially take the throne, but the rest was just irrelevant to me, not to mention ridiculously long and boring.
So there are some of my specific complaints to add something to the discussion.
spliced said:
Anytime you have anything this popular you are bound to get the backlash syndrome kick in.
I hate people that say this. It's just one of those stupid excuses made in an effort to end the discussion and dismiss all criticism without even addressing it.
