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LOTR: Return of the King

Started by Dunk!, 18 December, 2003, 03:48:48 PM

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Dan Kelly

I beleive teh current situation is that New Lien now own the rights to the film, but that someone else owns distribution rights - and that is what is now being negotiated for.

SPOILER








As for the scouring, I can't see how it could have been included without another hour of movie.  It's importance is in how the hobbits have changed over the time, and re-focuses story on them.  

As for the endings of the movie, only the last one felt too many for me...

Dan

Waiting for the EE:DVD







Woolly

SPOILER ALERT!!!

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In the extended edition of Two Towers, we see Merry and Pippin drinking the Ent draught and getting taller as a result.

So why are they their original sizes in ROTK?

Only a minor niggle, but it also affects the end of the movie a bit.

And Saruman does die at the end of ROTK, but it aint the hobbits who do it. They decide to show mercy as they pity him, and let him leave. Its Wormtongue who sticks a knife in his back.

Quirkafleeg

Ok Spurrier... with the caveats that I realise why he cut it out and I've not read the book for many a year so I had forgot a lot of the details (and had 'remembered' things from the radio play) BUT the scouring of the shire is one of the key elements of the text adding humanity of scale to the previous epic events and showing that 'evil' and destruction does not have to all huge and dark but can be small-town and cheap and nasty. Would have been a perfect cracker to go with some of the big slices of cheese at the end

So take that, you media student, you!

And what happened to the best Oz actor evah Bruce Spense (played the Gyro Captain in Road Warrior and The Trainman in Matrix) as one the bad guys as promised... grrrrr!!

Dunk!

Bruce Spense was meant to be The Mouth of Sauron. It definitly got filmed so maybe its a DVD thing. But then i can't remember if the mouth of sauron...

Spoilers













Turns up before the battle at Minas Tyrith or The black gate. Those who have read the Book recently and not as a teenage please answer me.
"Trust we"

Tiplodocus

Be excellent to each other. And party on!

El Spurioso

Nah, it's a final opportunity for Tolkien to demonstrate how much his central characters have changed (grown, if you call being authoratative and violent 'growth'), and a last less-than-subtle crowing of the "industry=bad, simple life=good" thing he was so keen on.  Agree that it added an additional flourish of character, but I'd argue that a) he left it a bit bloody late, b) it does so completely at the expense of a single 'big note' to finish on (which is probably very lowest-common-denominatorish of me, but *everyone* loves a good climax... hur hur hur), and c) regardless of whether it worked in the book or not there's not an exec producer in the world who would have included it in a mass-market film.  All IMHO, of course.

For what it's worth, I thought Peter Jackson's take on it - the little nods the hobbits gave the fat guy as they rode past, and the silent "we don't belong here" moment back in the Green Dragon, acheived pretty much the same thing as the whole scouring, in terms of showing how the characters had changed.

As for communicating that evil isn't just confined to huge battles and world-shaking events: in my mind, it's far more dramatic to demonstrate that evil works in *any* scale, then ramp it up to show just how bad it can get; rather than doing it the other way round.  But, meh, Tolkien's the guy with more awards than nails in his coffin, so what do I know?

A repeat of the IMHO caveat, just in case.

Quirkafleeg

tsk I'm going to have read it again if I'm gonna make any kind of decent argument (well I could rant on from an ignorant position which is amusing for others but not very clever). Points taken though... I'm gonna be writing a review very soon.

"As for communicating that evil isn't just confined to huge battles and world-shaking events: in my mind, it's far more dramatic to demonstrate that evil works in *any* scale, then ramp it up to show just how bad it can get; rather than doing it the other way round."

Err sorry not got a clue what you mean here... can you be more specific?

El Spurioso


Dramatising the nature of evil:  Start small, work up.  Better than start big, work down.

Art

Got to side with Spurious here: That scourging thing sounds dull as ditchwater and makes me glad I never finished reaidng the books.

downside: No Chris Lee

Richmond Clements

Thanks El Spurioso, and the rest of you, for the info, there.

I agree that the end went on a bit long, but he couldn't have made the end any shorter really, without leaving some loose ends.
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Nice to see Bilbo at the end, just as I was wondering what had happened to him.
That scouring of the shire thing sounds like a whole other adventure to me, not really the way to wind down a three hour + movie.

Quirkafleeg

yeah, well it would sound boring if you only read Spurs spin on it and not the original...

Woolly

The scouring of the shire was about the petty nature of evil, in the sense that Saruman only destroyed much of the shire to get back at the hobbits who helped destroy his tower.

It showed that even the greatest evil power can be reduced to a selfish weasel!

Jim_Campbell

> Oh, and Shelob was great... you could feel
> everyone in the cinema holdong their breath
> when*CENSORED*, brilliant.

Went to see it yesterday afternoon. My wife nearly broke all the fingers in my hand during the Shelob sequences.

[Engage ramble mode]

I have to say, after the truly vile experience that was Matrix: Revolutions and the outraged howling that's been going on in the Tolkien NGs, I entered the cinema with some trepidation. Please, oh, please don't let this be another ***ing let down.

Fookin' loved it. The only downside for me (having been thoroughly forewarned about the absence of Christopher Lee) was the horrendous over-playing of Denethor's final fate.

The vast majority of deviation from the book was by omission rather than revision - which is why the extended DVDs are there. Along with Saurman's fate, I strongly expect to see Aragorn using the Palantir to [SPOILER OMITTED - Read the books!] ...

But I have no real beef with the film on any level - the Scouring, like Tom Bombadil, is a contentious issue amongst those who know the books, but for the purposes of making a movie, you can't just tack on a separate and distinct sub-story right at the end. So, for me, it's exclusion was entirely understandable.

Yes, the film has flaws, but, as I remember banging on about when Fellowship came out, I'd rather see a film with flaws and quirks that mark it out as the product of director with a vision than the bland, blockbuster-by-comittee experience that we are so often fed.

Two things happened that I can't remember happening in a cinema for a great many years - a great deal of suppressed sniffling from all around the theatre for pretty much the last 30 minutes of the movie [1], and spontaneous applause when the final credits rolled.

If nothing else, Jackson deserves some kind of credit for putting so much spectacle on the screen without sacrificing the characters. For all the vast (and, IMHO, unrivalled) battle sequence, the sight of Frodo and Sam crawling up the slopes of Mount Doom is a real lump-in-the-throat moment and is what the books are really about: small, individual heroism in the face of overwhelming evil.

Absolutely the best film I've paid to see in years. We sat in the pub afterwards unable to coherently articulate anything through sheer sensory overload.

[Ramble mode off]

See it. Just bloody see it, all right?

Cheers

Jim

[1] SPOILER - you have been warned!














... Bearing in mind that, until the last few minutes, nothing particularly sad happens. There's a genuine sense of joy at the reunion and Aragorn's "You bow to no-one" bit is a movie invention, but cracking one ...
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Quirkafleeg

Not that I'm obsessed or anything... but the Scouring of the Shire (I've just found out) is also a deliberate linking of the LoTR to epics of the past, in particular, the Odyssey, where the hero, thinking all his tasks are done, returns to find his home country laid waste and it's not over by a long way...

Tiplodocus

Loved it.
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There are definitely clunky bits (When Eowyn says "I am a woman", I was half expecting the Witch King to say "Well, duh!"

As predicted I cried at two bits; the ride of the rohirrim - I'm sure some people just look at the six thousand spears against one hundred thousand baddies as eye candy but I thought the emotion of the sacrifice they were about to make was brilliant (George Lucas, please take note).  And then just as you've been gobsmacked by the charge, the war elephants turn up and your gob is smacked all over again (though the effort of taking them down was belittled somewhat by having Legolas have a "cool" shield surfing moment. Bastards).

OH and I cried when the Hobbits were halfway up the crack of doom.

It did drag on a bit at the end but I couldn't see another way to tie up all the loose ends and still get to the "I'm back" final line. The only ending I'd have left out was the slow mo reunion at Frodo's bed.

But brilliant stuff.


Oh sorry, I mean. It totally ROCKS!
Be excellent to each other. And party on!