Spoiler Alert for Lord of the Rings!! You have been warned...
Back from LOTR. Hmm. What to say, what to say...
(We had to sit in the third row. The theater was packed. I saw the preview for Rollerball (we were late, so I missed the other one--and one looked kinda good. Something about "You should return to your own time..." is all I caught of it, though.) and I thought I was going to get motion sickness.)
It's a good movie, but...
I always say that. I said that with Harry Potter. I said that with a lot of other movies that were almost perfect. Almost, but not quite.
Actually, I think I liked Harry Potter better. Now you can kill me. I read the whole LOTR series a long time ago, and have never reread them. I purposely didn't reread them before I went to see the movie. I am not a rabid fan.
The panoramas were great, the battles were great, if a bit blurry, the whole elf-thing was a bit... I don't know. I think my main problem with the movie is that the camera kept straying to Elijah Wood's face, or the nearest main character's visage. Now, while they all have fairly nice faces, it reminded me of that Mars movie. (What was it called? The one with the blondish guy who had the eyelashes out to here and where they found something on Mars and the big dust cloud killed everyone but one guy and he survived because he got the greenhouse running... Okay, before I get sidetracked, the camera in the Mars movie kept pausing on his face. I got sick of the guy's face by the end of the movie.) Anyway. It irritated me.
So. I'm not sure if it was my current obsession with fabric, though, and I didn't catch this until the very end so I might have to see it again to find out, but weren't the Hobbits wearing backpacks? How in the hell do you wear a backpack with a cloak and still be able to use/move in the cloak?!?! I've tried it! Unless the straps of their packs went over their chests and attached to some sort of belt or something... I only noticed at the very end when Sam and Frodo were in the boat. But if they were wearing backpacks, how did that work? The one time I tried it I was so uncomfortable that I decided backpacks and cloaks just didn't mix. :) I'd like to know the secret.
My other peeve is the fabric of their clothes. It looked... I don't know. Too new? Even Strider wore relatively nice-ish clothes. I guess I expected something a bit more medieval. I did not, for example, like the fabric of the dress that Galadriel wore. I have some fabric just like it in my basement, but it's blue. I paid about $2.50 a yard for it. *g*
And all the elves looked like they were losing hair, I mean, okay, they have fine, straight hair, but I have fine straight hair too, and my hair doesn't look like that. And what was the deal with Galadriel? Her little "Everyone will love me and worship me if I take the ring" just didn't work for me. Sauromon? However you spell his name... he had the same problem with his hair. it bothered me.
If someone who had never read LOTR, or The Hobbit, or seen either of the cartoons had sat down to watch this movie, they would be lost. There was too much backstory, and not enough leading up to current events. We got the ancient stuff, but nothing past Bilbo finding the ring. That's all wonderful for those of us who know the story, but for someone who doesn't... (Another tangent, here... It reminds me of the live-action 101 Dalmations movie. At the time, I went to see it and thought to myself that if someone who hadn't seen the Disney movie sat down to watch the live-action one, they'd be lost in the beginning.) Anyway, just a little peeve of mine, I guess.
Thanks to Laura Underwood's newsgroup on sff.net, I immediately thought "Keebler?" when Bilbo told Frodo Sting was made by elves. *g* I came very close to whispering it to my husband, but I restrained myself.
My hubby, who hasn't read the books, regaled me about how Dragonlance was similar all the way home. Sigh.
I think my main problem is a problem a lot of movies have for me. (Especially Episode 1, but we won't get into that here.) I wanted background. I wanted to know who was who when where why and how, or be shown the answers. I felt a little lost, (just like Episode 1) and I spent most of the movie trying to remember what had happened in the books so I wouldn't be too lost. *g* Hopefully the next movie will be better.
Good things: the scenery, but I could have used a little less of it. The two birds when they first passed through the two statues looked like a mistake, but I could be wrong. The battles... The orcs and goblins, except for their very human-looking eyes. Hobbiton was cool too. I really liked the houses. I want to live in one of them. *g*
More later, I have to go eat supper!
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