I probably should have gotten around to watching the trilogy by now just as a matter of due diligence, but they were always low on my ever-expanding list of films to catch up on. I chose to watch the trilogy for this column mostly as a personal challenge and decided to watch them all in a single weekend. Three hours in, I was regretting the decision. The Fellowship of the Ring is an absolute slog, a humourless, poorly paced prologue that goes on forever.
I felt no attachment to the story, perhaps since the vast majority of my brain power was used to simply hold my place amid a cascade of unfamiliar names. Frodo, Gandalf, Aragorn, Arwen. At least one character is named Sam, but even that is short for something weird: Samwise. I really could have also used a Jim or a Bruce.
Absolutely everything has a different name in this world. It almost seems designed not to work on the first viewing, but to encourage repeat viewings and further research; steps that at this point I found it very unlikely I would take.
Gandalf even dies at a similar point in the story. Han was a crucial character in the original Star Wars trilogy because he consistently undercut the high-mindedness with wit and sarcasm. It was as if a guy in the back of the theatre cracking jokes had been transported into the film. The first film was released in the US in December , a time when Americans were most definitely not interested in making light and were contemplating the nature of good and evil in profound ways.
Even though it ends in victory, the trilogy is imbued with a sense of overwhelming loss. Today, that film has something of a cult following, but in it went more or less unheralded, losing money for Universal and generally being viewed as a disappointment, despite decent reviews.
Its budget? And what were those films like , exactly? Glad you asked. Follow-up Meet the Feebles is a legendarily gross and raunchy puppet movie, caricaturing The Muppets by doing things that would make the creators of Team America: World Police do a double take. He then produced zombie comedy Braindead , which is arguably the most purely bloody and gory film ever made , before gaining his first critical acclaim with Heavenly Creatures , a drama about a notorious s New Zealand murder case.
To say that Peter Jackson had never even attempted something halfway comparable before in his career, in terms of either scale or tone, is a gross understatement.
It was a massive risk to hand the keys of this franchise over to him—the equivalent of Marvel Studios hiring someone like Eli Roth to direct The Avengers immediately after seeing his work on Cabin Fever and Hostel. One wonders if most of the producers Jackson was speaking to had even seen the likes of Meet the Feebles , and if they would have dared to hand him the works of J. To think that the same man was responsible for both this gory insanity and a fully realized Lord of the Rings adaptation seems truly impossible.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, Jackson faced a total lack of interest from most American studios as he tried to fight for an LOTR film series, never hearing back from the vast majority of places he pitched. This is how he put it in an interview with Indiewire:. And we put this whole pretense on that this project was so eagerly sought after [laughs], which is complete crap.
The same story. Finally, against all odds, Jackson was going to get his shot at a Lord of the Rings trilogy. But how do you adapt something that many consider to be unadaptable? In the process, they pulled off what is rightfully regarded as one of the most successful literary adaptations of all time, both preserving the spirit of the source material and discarding those elements that would have held back the films.
That would be all CGI if they did this. It feels like a heightened comic book reality. But even the The Dark Knight Jordan: The Dark Knight are chilly movies.
I want to bring up another epic film that a lot of people equate with some of the finest technical craftsmanship of all time: A Space Odyssey. Is the mark of an influential movie is how often is it on TBS at 3 p.
What we consider classics In the grand scheme of art, maybe it was always supposed to be disposable. Dave: I think curation is going to be really important. And people saying this is the stuff that needs to survive. And Lord of the Rings, I hope, will survive. I think it has a better chance than most things to to stick with us as a culture. Jordan: The jumping off point was satire. And we all just interact with people who look and think like us.
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