I just watched the extended version of The Two Towers, having watched The Fellowship of the Ring last Saturday. If nothing else, those films are epic. Really, the sheer scale of them is immense, and the cohesiveness of all the elements, any one of which could so easily be rendered ridiculous through cliche or insincerity, is nothing short of a marvel. Of course, by now, you’ve probably either seen the films or have no interest in seeing them, and, either way, have a firm opinion of them which I am unlikely to change, and have no desire to.

For my part, I’d kind of forgotten how good they were. Though each of the extended films runs to around two-hundred minutes, just twenty minutes shorter than Sergione Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America, a masterpiece which I have the utmost respect for, the Lord of the Rings films do not seem to last nearly as long: with Once Upon a Time in America, admittedly an emotionally draining film, you feel like you’ve been there a long time, a life-time in fact; but with Lord of the Rings, time seems to disappear.

So yeah, I enjoy the Lord of the Rings films. They’re much better than, for example, Beowulf, which was an abysmal film almost entirely devoid of any merit whatsoever: an unengaging story, poorly drawn characters and a gimmicky, ugly visual style, that seemed wholy unjustified by the end product: what’s the point of pioneering computer-generated visual techniques without incorporating any memorable spectacle? The Lord of the Rings would have been a lot easier and a lot cheaper to make either with pure CGI or Beowulf-style… whatever technique that is, but they opted to do it the traditional hard way, using real actors and sets augmented with special effects. On the other hand there is the underappreciated Final Fantasy: Spirits Within, a movie that failed to attract audiences because it was attached to a videogame license not mainstream enough for the vast majority of the movie-going public, yet lacking the fan-service or previously-established characters that would have brought more Final Fantasy players to see it. It didn’t help that the plot was, to say the least, underwhelming, and yet, forgetting the plot, it is one of the finest CGI movies ever made, though it bankrupted the company that made it and probably did more harm than good to the pursuit of realistic CGI motion picture production. Perhaps, a decade later, Avatar will finally match it in graphic quality and, if the dissatisfaction expressed in the wake of the recently released trailer is anything to go by, plot quality as well.

But Beowulf didn’t even have that. I actually think the film would have been improved if they rotoscoped it and presented the whole feature in the style of a medieval tapestry.

I should mention at this point I have never read Beowulf, the oldest story written in the English language, so I can’t really compare it to the film’s plot (as I will be doing when I watch Troy, having read The Iliad earlier this summer), but I somehow suspect that the original story will turn out to be better than the film. And if not: firstly, if it was the first English story, it can be cut some slack; secondly, why are they making a film of it and; thirdly, why could they not have improved it for the screen, perhaps even with some sort of techno-update like Too Human attempted, with minor success and the occasional good idea, to do for Norse Mythology?

Back to Lord of the Rings, and, to further extrapolate on a point I was making earlier, the suspension of disbelief within those movies is brilliantly accomplished, except for the lines which have been forever immortalised in internet history, my enjoyment of which has been increased to the point of audible laughter when, in all seriousness, the characters speak them, even if I am momentarily pulled right out of the fiction. Some of these include the following Youtube videos:

And, of course, forum threads:

And, who could forget:

Tags: Avatar, Beowulf, CGI, Final Fantasy, Final Fantasy: Spirits Within, Harry Potter, Luna Lovegood, Mordor, Once Upon a Time in America, Sergio Leone, Tank-Cat, The Lord of the Rings, They're Taking the Hobbits to Isengard, Too Human, YouTube

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 10th, 2009 at 12:28 am and is filed under Opinions. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.