Went and saw it yesterday.
Staggering. A visual feast that does do what the hype says and surpasses the other two.
But I'm a biased LOTR fan viewing it with rose-tinted glasses, what do other boarders think?
Its absolutely spanking!
Definately the best of the three, and i simply cannot wait for the extended edition.
If Peter Jackson doesnt win an oscar for this, then there simply isnt any justice!
Wul
definate 'down english cinema' job, lotr...its christmas tradition now init...
Did you read the thing in Metro about a week ago to coincide with the premiere?
It mentioned the chances of The Hobbit getting made.
Peter Jackson said he wanted to do it, Sir Ian McKellen said he wanted to do it, Andy Serkis said he wanted to it and New Line said they had the rights to film it and THEY wanted to do it!
Only one snag, someone else has the distibution rights. But New Line admitted they are currently negotiating a deal to get all the rights.
To say 'fingers crossed' would be an understatement!
'Pah, prequels are never any good ;>
I've been told that PJ's original cut for ROTK was over 6 hours, but he had to make further cuts to get it to just under 3? hours.
Wonder how long he'll make the extended version?
I'm up for watching a 6 + hour film (if it's as good as people say the 3+ hour film is).
I haven't seen any of them in the cinema. I'm in two minds whether to see this one, or wait for the Extended version, which I did with the other 2- plus by then I might have finished reading the books!
The Army of the Dead was not what I was expecting. Sometimes the camera panned too far back and made it all look like a big game of He-Man. And it had a lame effect at the end with sam (frodo?) on Mount Doom. These things aside, it was amazing. Really really amazing. Its all a bit of a blur right now as there is so much to take in.
hex
All I can say is - [backslash]m/
Contrary to my comments previous, I'll probably end up seeing it.
Most importantly, has anyone asked Ian Holm?
The hobbit could be a massive film in it's own right, I mean, big battle, big fuck off dragon. I love the hobbit, so I hope they have a go!
I saw ROTK last night too, what a great movie! I'll probably end up going to see it again too!
No spoilers, please, but could someone who's read the book & seen the film tell me one thing - is the final fate of the Ring in the film the same as in the book?
Yes
Dan
Just saw the film.
Very very good. Like the other two films, there were one or two moments of utter ridiculous cheesiness, but on the whole it's very cool.
It's funny, re-watching parts 1 and 2, how huge the gulf is between the quality of the majority of the material and those odd moments of absolutely shocking awfulness - the heavy exposition in part 1, the stupid comedy moments in part 2, etc etc. And they're there again in part 3 in 'heap on the cheese' form - I won't spoil it - but the point is it's STILL a brilliant trilogy, and well worth watching.
I think that (more in the extended version) the comedy moments in part 2 are handled very well, and give the film greater emotional depth with a lighter side revealed. But that's just me!
Sorry, but the last 20 mins is the biggest load of sugary piffle since i last saw a Doris Day film.
"It mentioned the chances of The Hobbit getting made."
IIRC, Christopher Tolkien is *not* happy about the possibility, and I suspect he may well block it. The only reason he couldn't stop the LotR films was that JRR Tolkien had sold the rights in the '60s. After his son came out in favour of the films and attended the FotR premiere, Christopher pulled him from the Tolkien Company board & disowned him (seriously - they haven't spoken and he won't see his grandchildren.)
As the rights to the Hobbit - and the rest of the estate - still rest with Christopher Tolkien, I don't think you'll be seeing a film adaptation of Bilbo's adventures anytime soon.
The upside of this, of course, is that there's little chance of a movie version of The Silmarillion... ;-)
The Hobbit rights don't rest with Chris Tolkein - they've been sold around quite a bit, but nobody's actually USED them yet!! I have no respect for the lad - nothing he's done has been good!! Everything of his father's that he pieced together felt shoddy, unfinished and just generally wrong. He shouldn't have bothered. Then the films, which were quite clearly magnificently handled and got a whole lot more people reading the books, are in some way totally unacceptable to him! Honestly, what a muppet!
"The Hobbit rights don't rest with Chris Tolkein - they've been sold around quite a bit, but nobody's actually USED them yet!"
Really? Everything I've read says that New Line are still negotiating with Tolkien's estate over film rights.
I'd agree with your sentiments re: Christopher Tolkien. I remember reading that he used to check his father's work for continuity errors and thinking: "Yes. That explains a *lot*..." :-)
Well it's pretty good but not as gobsmaking as seeing the first one for the first time... though the battle scenes take the sfx level. And there were points were I was thinking: this scene is dragging and that is so obviously a kid pretending to be a hobbit there. And no Scouring of the Shire... best bit in the bloody book...
saw it last night... bloody late night and i'm shot now.
still, it was worth it. a truly great film.
i am so pleased they pulled it off.
sad about Christopher Tolkein and his son Simon. It certainly stood out that Simon received the Big Read award and not his Dad.
There has been an animated version of the Hobbit, (which ive got but cannot bring myself to watch due to the cheesy songs in it!) but i dont know wether that needs the same rights as a filmed version would.
Just hope no one makes a tv movie of it. THAT would suck big time!
animated hobbit is fairly good, hobbit would make great film but i think it would have to be done to same scale as lotr now
Most annoying part is how there are patently filmed scenes that have been excised clumsily ready to be put back into the DVD.
As evidence:
Frodo in the tower with Bad Orc A, Sam approaches those talking statue things at the doorway.
Next scene is Sam through the doorway unhindered, back to Frodo this time with Bad Orc B.
There's a rather marvellous Hobbit song by none other than Leonard Nimoy bouncing around isn't there?
stupidvideo.com is probably a good place to look if you really have to...
I'm off to see this tonight and am quite looking forward to it.
'Tha Ballad of Bilbo Baggins', i believe!
It does exist, and its bloody awful!
(But not as awful as Shatner's 'Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.)
Yes, I think the animated Hobbit film needed the same rights as a film would, and they still rest with the company that did that. Or they were sold to someone else. There's a complication of some sort, but it'll probably get sorted out eventually
Saw it last night. Bloody out of this world, it was!
Could someone who's read the books tell me how much the end differs in the movie from the original source?
Oh, and Shelob was great... you could feel everyone in the cinema holdong their breath when*CENSORED*, brilliant.
SPOILERS
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Given how much the ending of the film felt like it dragged (all those protracted 'goodbyes' - ugh!) I think Peter Jackson made exactly the right decision in changing the ending. Basically he was faithful-ish up until the point when the four hobbits go back to the Shire.
In the *book*, they get back to discover the happy hobbit folk are in the grip of an evil overlord by the name of 'Sharkey', who is industrialising the land, being a bit of a bugger and generally causing a bit of a ruckus.
Sharkey turns out to be Saruman, with his snivelly little pal Wormtongue - who knew about the Shire thanks to the constant references to tobacco and how 'the hafling's leaf' is so very good and yadda yadda yadda. Anyways, our Hobbity heroes see him off (can't remember if they kill him) and everyone lives happily every after.
The sequence is called 'the Scouring of the Shire', and Peter Jackson's excuse for not including it was that he'd hinted at its possibility in Galadriel's mirror. What he *should* have said was: it's fucking boring, and the world's biggest anticlimax (or, rather, anteclimax), so I thought for the sakes of everyone's sanity I'd leave it out.
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
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.
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!!
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.
At the Black Gate.
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.
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?
Dramatising the nature of evil: Start small, work up. Better than start big, work down.
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
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.
yeah, well it would sound boring if you only read Spurs spin on it and not the original...
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!
> 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 ...
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...
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!
finally managed to see it last night, just got a seat as it came up with 'return of the king' ( probably missed a huge queue so no bad thing ).
very cool but ...
a) it will only work on big screen, all those epic shots
b) the dead AGAIN come and save the battle at the last minute
c) missing out that last 'return to the shire' part, ooo thats bad, either its a working of the book or its not, of course odd little details here and there can be dropped but the entire 'its not over !' part ?
i expect c may get done at some point in a dvd add-on or somet ?
dreddd
THE LAW
Theres already been a discusion on the wether the scouring of the shire should be in the film. Its an importantant part of the book, but the film, had to be cut. Remmber also that the Shire episode only has the hobbits in it and they havent been as big (if you excuse the pun)a focus in the films as they are in the book, probably due to time constraints.
ISTR, Ian McKellen saying theres something like 5 hours worth of footage that could be in the film.... So thats an extra 2 hours of footage. Im sure that Christopher Lee said he had about an extra 15 mins or so.
Oh Im off to see it this evening...
Yer Slips
The Hobbits serve to illustrate Tolkein's vision of "innocence" - unfortunately it comes across in these jaded times as "twee", so a lot of the Hobbiton scenes had to be cut. I reckon it's a good argument against doing "The Hobbit" as well.
Saw this last night.
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Have to agree that the scouring of the shire works well as a couple of nods and a furtive glance in the film.
Shame that Pippin and Merry never wore their armour on their return to the Shire.
Kack effect on Mt Doom, with Sam and Frodo doing a magic moonwalk.
The sequence with the 'Oliphaunts' (Did I get that spelling right?) is amazing. All through it I was thinking of Empires AtAt attack and wondering what Lucas would make of it.
Sam to Shelob: Get away from him you Filth!
Ripley to Queen ALIEN: Get away from her you bitch!
Just an observation, but I liked that.
The death of the Witch King: amazing effect, really creepy.
As usual, Gimli gets some cracking one liners!
Absolutely loved it.
Bolt-01
opens here in 2 days time, just rang to get tickets oh shit first session sold, no prob expected thatget second sesh tickets except that doesn't start till 9.30pm at 3hours 20minutes dont think I'll be watching it that late oh well fist thing Saturday it is. Can't wait.....really want the extended version now......
CU Krestel
Saw it Monday evening, impressed but like everyone I have a few points
All three major battles end in a deus ex machina, whether its elves, the dead or the death of Sauron. Are these the luckiest heroes ever or what?
For me Gollum was the best thing in the films, creepy, mad and helpful all at the sametime.
I want a best freind like Sam.......
The sequence with the 'Oliphaunts' (Did I get that spelling right?) is amazing. All through it I was thinking of Empires AtAt attack and wondering what Lucas would make of it.
Yep I had that thought too.... and I believe Orlando Bloom was called back recently to do some "cool" fight shots. The Olipphants scene must be it surely.
I really cant add much more praise thans already been done. I for the most part was very impressed, hope they get an Oscar or two...
Yer Slips
'All three major battles end in a deus ex machina, whether its elves, the dead or the death of Sauron. Are these the luckiest heroes ever or what?'
That was one of the things that really pissed me off when I read the book... Sauron's gone and all the orks just bloody vanish.