Am I the only one...

[rj_anderson]

...who was distracted by weird and inappropriate thoughts during the movie, such as the bit where Sam and Frodo first appear in their orc-garb complete with clunky face-covering helmets, where I had to suppress a snicker because the only thing I could think of was "Aren't you a little short for a stormtrooper?" I also found myself noticing very much when the actors playing the hobbits were clearly on their knees (such as Pippin looking out over the battlements at Minas Tirith, with Gandalf standing behind him) and when the hobbits seen from a distance were clearly child body doubles for the actors. And I don't usually notice or care about such things, so it does seem to indicate a certain lack of engagement with the movie on my part.

Oh, there were bits that were incredibly moving -- I teared up and sniffled at least two or three times, over things like the signal fires and Pippin's song intercut with Faramir's hopeless charge and the armies of Rohan riding off to battle crying "Death!" (um, that was what they were crying, right? It was hard to be quite sure. But anyway, I still got misty-eyed.) And Sean Astin as Sam was utterly perfect, as was Miranda Otto's Eowyn, and I really liked Billy Boyd's Pippin this time, whereas I'd always just found him annoying before. Oh, and Shelob was possibly the scariest thing I've ever seen on film -- I nearly broke my husband's hand with squeezing it, and several times I had to shut my eyes.

But the problem with all the LotR movies for me, including and perhaps especially this one, was that all those big battle scenes just leave me numb. There's just too much sound and fury going on, and it's happening far too fast, with far too many people involved, for me to feel as though I have a stake in it all. Not to mention that in the earlier movies, character development was sacrificed for action to the extent that I didn't have a sense of identification with many of the characters anyway. If I hadn't known from the books which characters I cared about and why, I think it would have been even harder for me to connect to the movie. As it was, I got a visceral thrill out of the encounter between Eowyn and the Witch-King, which I thought was magnificently done, but the rest of the battle? Whatever.

Also, there were parts that just left me scratching my head. Why bother to throw in an apocryphal bit where Merry tells Pippin that Sauron thinks he has the ring, if for the rest of the movie Pippin is not going to experience any added threat or danger whatsoever? And what was all that nonsense with Elrond telling Aragorn that Arwen's life is tied to the fate of the Ring? Why would Arwen be more affected by the Ring's power than any other elf in Middle-Earth? And weren't the stakes quite high enough already, without throwing an "oh, and your girlfriend's going to die if you don't defeat Sauron" into the mix?

Mind you, even with those quibbles, it's not as though I have some idea of another director who would do a better job of LotR than Peter Jackson did. And it's certainly not as though I think I could do a better job myself. If I think of the movies as exceptionally elaborate illustrations for the books, they're pretty amazing. But the fact remains that I really don't have any desire to sit down and watch any of them again. I want to see the scenes in the extended versions that I didn't see in the theatre; I expect I'll be sitting in front of my VCR one of these days with my thumb on the fast-forward button, doing just that. But my desire to start over again from the beginning of the first film and watch the saga patiently through to its end, as a true fan of the movies would do, is nil.

What I do find myself wanting to do again is read the books.

Comments

[jamesbow.livejournal.com]

A couple of times. Like, when Elrond came to Aragorn to deliver Anduril, I half-expected him to say, "this is from my daughter" and kiss him, followed with, "and this is from me," and punch him in the nose. But the scene that had me quoting Monty Python was Aragorn riding up to the Black Gates and calling out Sauron. Big words. What's he going to do if the Black Gates *don't* open? "Sauron's father was a hamster, and his mother smelled of elderberries!" :-)

[rj-anderson.livejournal.com]

*giggles*