The Fellowship of the Ring

Cable TV has begun advertising “The Fellowship of the Ring”, which will be starting on one of the movie channels in a few weeks. Just out of curiosity, am I the only person on the planet who found those first two movies to be spectacularly ordinary?

When you take on the task of making a movie adaptation of a book/trilogy, particularly a 20th century classic, you automatically adhere to an unwritten covenant which states that you must remain as faithful as possible to the text. Exceptional circumstances arise when the writer/director exploits the vast differences between the written word and audio/visual mediums to enhance upon elements in the book (see David Fincher’s Fight Club), but watering down the narrative to make it more digestible to the average, ignorant movie-goer (see Ridley Scott’s Hannibal, or rather, read Thomas Harris’ version instead) is unforgiveable. If you haven’t seen the movie yet, let me save you the trouble by summarising in neat, sequential format.

Introduction/majestic, sweeping shot of CGI imagery/dialogue re: character development/action sequence/majestic, sweeping shot of CGI imagery/have a conversation in Elvish to placate the nerds/romance scene for female demographic/dialogue re: difficulty of mission/majestic, sweeping shot of CGI imagery/action sequence/dwarf tossing joke/dialogue re: difficulty of mission/majestic, sweeping shot of CGI imagery/romance scene for female demographic/dialogue re: difficulty of mission/action sequence/majestic, sweeping shot of CGI imagery/etc

Get the idea? As for The Two Towers, its practically the same, except with a few dozen more “dialogue re: difficulty of mission” scenes to push the tedium levels to maximum. That bit where Aragorn was feared dead just to add a little emotional anti-climax to a lagging quarter of an hour was appallingly lame, as was completely altering the ending in order to squeeze the credits in before wee-wee time for the average audience member. And when a CGI character completely and utterly fucking CARRIES a movie, alarm bells should start ringing. Sure, the Balrog and the Helm’s Deep battle were cool, but no better than what occurred in my own imagination when I first read the books as an 8 year old. I suppose when you spend hundreds of millions of dollars on a movie project these days, appealing to the lowest common denominator is the simplest way to make sure you’ll profit.