Lord of the Rings - A Dissenting Opinion
Well look what I found on my computer! A blog entry that predates this actual blog by almost a year and a half!! Just goes to show that I�ve wanted to do something like blogging for a long time, and all I needed was to discover the right format for shooting my mouth off -- er, I mean, expressing my opinions!
1/13/02: I saw the Lord of the Rings, Fellowship of the Ring, yesterday. What can I say? It was a very well made movie... that just really didn't do anything for me. Except give my wife nightmares about "Orcs". Clearly the movie was made for fans of the book. I never read it. Had I read the book(s) when I was younger, I'm sure I'd be raving about this movie now, just as all the fans are. Instead, I was sitting in the theater beginning to understand those people who just never really liked Star Wars. They were probably around my age now, back in '76 when Star Wars came out. It didn't do anything for them.
Of course the special effects were great, but I was never one to laud a movie on that account. Special effects are not really special anymore, they've become "movie infrastructure", and I think that's a good thing. Any movie that tells a story that in any way departs from reality should have believable special effects, and technology has advanced to the point where now any movie can. So in my opinion, "great special effects" is not a reason to spend the money to see a movie. As a movie goer I expect great special effects. The truly great thing about state of the art special effects is that they enable movies like Jurassic Park to be made, and made believable! Ok, that's the exception to what I just said -- I'd go see (and have) the Jurassic Park movies just for the special effects. I know the plots are weak before I go. It just amazes me to see dinosaurs walking as if they're not extinct! Anyway, I've digressed from Lord of the Rings.
I knew before I saw this movie that I like science fiction and have never really liked fantasy. I went to Lord of the Rings honestly trying to give the fantasy genre another chance. I have a fundamental problem suspending disbelief with fantasy. (Also with badly thought out movies/books that call themselves science fiction when in my opinion they really aren't. I'd call Dune fantasy, for example. Giving a feudal society space travel does not science fiction make, imho. And what is "spice" but unexplained magic?) Most science fiction is set in the future, so events could conceivably happen that way. Fantasy is usually set in the past -- a past we know enough about to know that nothing like elves, trolls, wizards, and unicorns ever existed. The best science fiction (Babylon 5, Encounter with Tiber, almost anything written by David Brin) explains all the fantastic technologies they use and makes them seem plausible extensions of current technologies and scientific understanding. This makes the critical reader feel like one day we might actually have such things! At the very least they label them "advanced alien technology that humans don't understand the workings of, but can use". So perhaps you can see why I have a problem suspending my disbelief in "magic". I guess that�s my attitude towards fantasy in a nutshell.
6/03/03: Since writing this, I've also seen the second movie, The Two Towers. As you can guess, I wasn't excited about it, and if left to my own devices I probably would not have gone to see it. As it happened I went with some friends. I liked this movie better. I liked the walking trees and that seriously schizophrenic Golem. However, the whole battle for that city so brilliantly strategically located not only with it's back to the wall preventing maneuver, but also under a big cliff from which all kinds of big, heavy things could be dropped on them, was disappointing.
Seems like in a real trilogy though -- that is not a movie with two sequels, you have to wait for the second book before the story really gets rolling. The first book usually has a lot of introduction, background, and scene setting. The last book a lot of conclusion. Other examples of this pattern would be both Star Wars trilogies and both of David Brin's Uplift trilogies, but don't get me started about Star Wars. I have a real love/hate thing with Star Wars. Maybe I'll rant and rave about that in a future post sometime...
