Fellows With Rings Part 1

2008-10-20 2:36:08 pm

Not seeing The Lord of the Rings has turned into the new "not seeing Star Wars" sense of shock and awe amongst the geek community. Up until Saturday, I had never seen the first of Peter Jackson's epic fantasy adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkein's Lord of the Rings books. I had actually seen the second one in college with some friends on a whim. I found it pretty boring.

When I was a kid all my friends read The Hobbit and the Rings books. I tried reading The Hobbit in fifth grade or so and found it so boring that I couldn't get through it. I've never been much a fan of fantasy literature or movies, with a few exceptions here and there. So when Jackson's first LOTR flick came out, I just didn't care. But Em did and she's been trying to get me to watch the DVDs of which she has all three (the regular ones, not the super-nerdy editions, thank goodness).

It was pretty good. I didn't fall in love with it or anything, but the story's compelling and the performances are great. I'm impressed with the cast to be honest. I mean, they got Leatherface: TCM3's Viggo Mortensen for goodness sake. But seriously, they did a great job.

What didn't impress me, though were the CGI special effects. Some, like Ballroq were really cool, but others just didn't look right. I know it's hard to do things like a giant squid monster as a practical effect, but it's no impossible, especially when considering how much thought and effort Jackson put into things like the hobbit feet (which rarely show up on screen) and the shire (which he apparently built a year before shooting to get the right feel).

I'm not going to get into a rehash of the plot, but it was engaging although long. And I hate when people complain about the length of a movie (Dark Knight for instance), but there did seem to be a good amount of padding (read: walking). I'm not really looking forward to watching the second movie because I remember a LOT of walking. Even the trees walk! Em even offered to skip it, but I'm nothing if not thorough, so we'll see how this goes.

As it stands, I've got to agree with Randall from Clerks 2 about Star Wars being the better trilogy, but we'll see how things go. (SPOILER: there's no way I'm going to say LOTR is better than SW.)