Remembering the Unlikeliest Blockbuster - Page 2

Just curious, what did you dislike about the films that you aren't a fan?

My guess is that if you didn't have an emotional connection to the hobbits in the film that the line probably fell flat for you.

This discussion is probably best diverted here

Seconded. I keep the theatrical versions because the extras don't overlap - the trailers are only on the theatrical DVDs (EE easter eggs notwithstanding).

And I don't get the Willow love; the film had some great effects, and Kilmer was fantastic in it (and Whalley was, as noted, quite fuckable) but the movie is a mess, and not a good one. Lucas just stole right from himself, and tonally, the film is really schizophrenic.

I was 20 when I saw it, and really disappointed in it when it came out. I don't think time has been kind to it.

Well, there's part of it. I was much much younger and haven't revisited it in many years, so I'm sure I'm remembering it in a rosy light.

I've was thinking nostalgia was a big part of it - if not all of it. If I had been 10 when I saw it, I likely would have loved it.

Hollywood really doesn't know how to do swords & sorcery. Until LotR, there were a bare handful of films, if that many, that got it right. Conan the Barbarian was and remains great. Dragonslayer was solid. Hard to think of any other fantasy films - and specifically swords & sorcery type films - that really got it right.

(I own The Sword & The Sorcerer, but while a great deal of fun, it's not really a "good" film like Conan or Dragonslayer.)

Great writeup Devin. I also fully agree on the unintended meanings in some of the dialogue of Fellowship, post 9/11. I saw it with a big crowd in a Long Island theater, in a town that lost a few of its own (firefighters and cops) when one of the towers collapsed. Those Gandalf lines had a big effect on me and I'm sure many in the crowd.

To the guy who mentioned the lighting of the bonfire sequence in ROTK: you're right---that less than one minute of film along with Howard Shore's score, was more exhilarating and imaginative than anything I've seen of the big summer blockbusters this year, combined. Well, okay, except for UP.

Based on that sequence alone, I've always wished that Warner Brothers would offer the Superman franchise to Peter Jackson. He wouldn't just hit it out of the ballpark, but he'd knock the cover off of the ball.

Fun coincidence. I bring all 3 EE DVDs to work today and find Devin's piece on CHUD. Pretty random.

Loved these movies. I probably haven't seen them in full for the longest time though. And I have no real urge to. The experience of watching each of them during their respective releases just can't be topped.

I keep both versions of each around. There are moments that are handled better in the theatrical cuts that I felt were thrown off in the EEs.

I remember going to the movies around the time ROTK was out and always sneaking a peak to see if I could catch moments like the Lighting of the Beacons or the Ride of the Rohirrim.

LOTR was almost certainly one of the riskiest blockbuster projects ever, not sure if it's the unlikeliest - that should probably be reserved for some out of the blue megahit like Big Fat Greek Wedding. LOTR always had world conquering potential, the only question was firstly whether the filmmakers could pull it off, and then whether mainstream audiences would take a chance and let themselves get swept up with it.

I'm the opposite. The TTT EE added a lot of character stuff that made it feel a much more rounded film - above all the great Boromir family reunion scene which *never* should've been taken out. That movie can admittedly be something of a slog though. The FOTR EE is mostly fine but the alternate Bilbo-centric intro is so inferior that I just can't see it as definitive. ROTK EE has its moments but mostly feels like a baggier version of the original.

LOTR discussions are acronymtastic.

That sequence kind of sums up why I love these films. How many others would even have thought to include something like that, let alone to go and devote so much time and loving attention to it in the middle of the climactic film?

I have really mixed feelings about that movie, because for everything it does so right, it completely pisses all over the source material in ways that my nerdiness can't get over. Probably the thing that annoys me most is that a lot of the R. E. Howard character's youth is spent as a thief and a pirate and that's the source of some great stories and explains a lot about why Conan is who he is, while the movie Conan's entire youth is spent turning a damn wheel and he's pretty much just a meathead.

No Excalibur love? Damn your God-less soul.

Seriously though, Willow just boils down to one scene for me: all the heroes being transformed into pigs. To this day, a great "what the fuck?" moment in summer blockbusters.

I'm thinking that Devin means the "unlikeliest blockbuster that had to be made with it being a blockbuster in mind considering the money that was spent on it."

Yeeees... that'll do.

What I love about that scene is that, in the book, it's pretty much a throwaway line from Gandalf to Pippin as they ride towards Minis Tirith. Gandalf says something along the lines of "The beacon fires are lit, Gondor prepares for war," and that's it. But Jackson takes that moment and not only uses it as a rousing sequence, it gives you a sense of the vast reach and age of the kingdom of Gondor, and it's a pretty nifty way to establish where Rohan is in relation to Gondor. All that from a sentence or two of text in the novel.

I like the LOTR films, own the extended editions, etc, but I can see things about them that may not jibe with everyone. If you have no propensity for sword and sorcery or really long movies where hobbits cry a lot, you're probably not going to like them. It's not like they are unassailable masterpieces like THE DARK KNIGHT.

HAHAHA.

whew.

"Yes, son. I was there to witness the beginning of the Great Internet War."

Fuck "Willow": There was a time when Bakshi's half-baked "LOTR" looked like all we were ever going to get of the story onscreen.

I believe you meant to say "Begun, this Nerd War has."

I disagree that he's just a meathead - I think we see Conan learning and transcending his origins as a slave. And I just don't care about detailed fidelity to source material; of the problems I have with LotR, very few of them have to do with the differences between the films and the books.

Forgot about this film. Helen Mirren! Fucking in full armor! More vaselined lenses than an entire season of Star Trek and Moonlighting!

Eh. I've caught pieces here and there. I'm not sure how well Excalibur holds up.

Well, I did concede it had great effects. I would have loved a movie focusing on Madmartigen, without the pseudo halflings.

Val Kilmer's performance, Joann Whalley's looks, and James Horner's score are the only good things to come out of Willow.

Viewed in its proper context (fever-dream second cousin to Monty Python and the Holy Grail), I'd say rather well.

Yeah, one has to keep in mind this was filmed around '79/'80 and released just before the summer film season of '81 kicked off. Thus the effects that would have come off as cheap but psychedelic (i.e. "Who...am...I...?") back in the day would be 100% Grade-A cheese nowadays.

That said, the film definitely holds up especially in the performances. I say it anytime Excalibur is brought up, but you'll never find a better King Arthur or Merlin on screen than Nigel Terry and Nicol Williamson.

You guys prefer the Extended Editions to the Theatricals? I agree in most cases to the changes but there is some stuff added in Two Towers I find completely unncessary. When I watch the films now I like to watch them like this

FOTR EE- TTT TE- ROTK EE

So you mostly prefer to watch the Extended Editions?

Yes, as I said in my post above I agree with a lot of the changes, but I don't feel the need to write off the theatrical editions. Sometimes I may even prefer to watch the TE of ROTK because I think it is a much tighter film than the EE.

i remember going with my BFF and only really vaguely remembering being read the hobbit and watching the cartoons back when i was tiny. i was truely blown away in the first five minutes, and by the time two towers rolled around, me adn my friends were buzzing about it for months before hand.

That's because your forefathers never left the UK. No offense.

Regarding the "You bow to no one." line...I didn't like it either. That rampart is packed, nay festooned, with survivors of a siege and TWO major & bloody battles against Sauron's forces, men and women who fought tooth and nail, just like the Hobbits. Those survivors have to bow to their new King, but the hobbits don't...just BECAUSE?!?

Fuck that. That is elitist bullshit. Love the films, though. Just never liked that line. It was playing to the audience.

What does that even mean? Is this one of those Freedom Isn't Free type of things?

I'm making an exception when the Blu Ray TEs hit, but otherwise, I take the Extended Editions of these films and dont look back. Even in the clusterfucked Extended ROTK, that which those versions get right, it gets so blissfully right I'm able to gloss over how many things the new scenes muddle up in the process.

I would call the EEs perfect movies, in the Devin sense. Im not sure I'd make that leap for the theatricals.

Do me a favor. Go outside. Look up, way up into that dazzling blue curtain of sky overhead, way up there amongst the clouds. If you look really closely, maybe, just maybe, you might catch a glimpse of the point of that scene flying overhead.

Nope. Didn't see a thing.

I don't know man, it's hard to think of a more opposite story than small, ordinary dudes take on the greatest evil in the entire world vs virtually indestructable god-like dude takes on a nasty captain of industry. I think Supes needs someone great to try and wring the drama out of that, but PJ seems an ill fit to me.


That and the fact that with everything great that Dinklage has accomplised, it was only made possible by the fact that he was standing on the shoulders of Warwick Davis.

Thanks so much for that Advocate Dev, I simply never get tired of waxing lyrical on this epic saga and what it means to me. My favorite books of all time (besides The Hobbit) done the sort of justice reserved for serious dramas like The Godfather, or Lawrence, with the eye of Spielberg meets Lean meets Kurosawa, all put together by a director who's work I'd grown up loving but never would have pegged to become the antipodes answer to The Beard that he has.

These films basically summarize for me every reason I love the movies so much in the first place. They were my very own filmic perfect storm of story, production and moment in time.

Hell after reading this piece I'm almost tempted to eventually get a BluRay player just to be able to watch the 3 EE's back to back on it.

As it is, it's been almost 3 years now, I reckon I'm due for another 12 hour visit to middle earth. The fall of Gandalf in Moria, the lighting of the beacons, the final charge at Helms Deep, "Let's hunt some orc", the charge of the Rohirrim, the look on Gollums face the first time Frodo calls him 'Smeagol', "That there's some good left in the world and it's worth fighting for", Sam carrying Frodo up Mount Doom, the last march of the Ents. So many moments. So many things I'd imagined and daydreamed about in my head from the age of ten that were brought so perfectly to life on screen that it felt like they'd been plucked from my subconscious. Jesus, I'm getting a constricted throat just thinking of it all.

I just won't have the perfect combination of emotion meets production like that with a set of movies again, I can't I only had one favorite story and Jackson did it more justice than I could ever have dreamed.

Thanks for making my morning here at work Dev.

PS - oh and Nick if you read this, I would kill - KILL - to reread your original 3 reviews of the cinematic releases of the theatrical cuts. I've found one, but the rest seem to be impossible to get even with a google search.

I remember when I was 11 or 12, before I knew anything about the internet movie scene, I used to read some film magazine (it could of been Empire but I can't really remember) that listed all of the big geek films that were currently in production. I had recently read The Hobbit after my dad suggested it and just bought a paperback copy of Fellowship. Well I saw that they were making them into films and they were going to be released in December of 2001, Summer of 2002, and then December of 2002. The idea that someone would make three films of the same time (and some New Zealand director I'd never heard of) blew my mind. It was a concept that was completely foreign to me.

Well on December 19th, 2001 my young mind was blown away. I walked out of that theater knowing what it must of felt like seeing Star Wars in 1977. It was also one of the few times leaving a theater feeling like everyone had been blown away just as equally as I had.

The thing that makes Gollum hard to top in terms of being a CG chracter, is the fact that his creation was a very fortunate coming together of lots of elements at the right time. The BIGGEST one being that he was written as a real character. Not as a CG character. If Tolkien's original material and Jackson/Walsh/Boyens adaptation of that material hadn't been there, it wouldn't have mattered how much artistry went into Serkis and WETA's performance.

So while some of the spottier shots of Gollum stand out a bit more now that we've been exposed to better rendered characters like Davy Jones, it certainly doesn't matter in the end. Gollum still manages to be the more memorable character with more dramatic oomph.

Revisited these films 2 months back, and it was really fun. I still wish ROTK EE didn't give away the Army of the Dead joining Aragorn. I liked the way it was in the theatrical.

Can't wait for the blu-rays.

A good reflection, but I think that the only thing that was unlikely about LOTR's success was that anyone was able to capture the spirit of the books at all, which, granted, was no small feat. However, given that Peter Jackson et all were able to accomplish that task, I think the success was pretty much guaranteed. The LOTR saga is immensely powerful on a level that goes beyond the usual confines of genre and subject matter--if someone got it right, people the audience would respond.

I also disagree with your comments about the timing of the series being related to its success. It's true that the films struck a deep emotional chord in the wake of the September 11th attacks, but I think the story would be equally powerful otherwise. I think it's also incorrect to say that Tolkien intended anything in the books to answer any specific events in real life--Tolkien notoriously detested allegory. Rather, I think that he tried to tell a universal story about the need to confront evil. That's about as big of a universal theme as you can get; it rang true after WW2, it rang true after 9/11, and it will ring true again in the future. It's something that audiences will always respond to. Great art always transcends its creation; the LOTR books and films both do that.

I agree...the source material was really one long novel, broken up for publishing purposes. The movie really capture that


Same here. I was unemployed (my company was trying to sell new technology...right after the Tech Bust. To big Financials. In the WTC. In Sept 2001. I was given the sack the Monday after Thanksgiving.

I remember walking up the street in Dec 19 2001 wondering what the hell I was going to do...when I spied the Grand Lake Theater in Oakland ahead of me, with a short line of people, some in costume, waiting to go in. Had one of the best times of my life watching FoTR with a great crowd of like minded geeks. Seeing the prologue then The Shire, on the big screen, and (seemingly) just as I'd always imagined it had me literally crying with joy.

I love Excalibur. The scene where Arthur is fighting the rogue knights, just after pulling the Sword from the Stone, has one of my favorite scenes: Arthur has just disarmed one of the rebels, has Excalibur at the man's throat. Arthur asks the knight for his allegiance: the knight replies: "give an oath to a Squire?!" Arthur replies "you are right" hand the guy his sword, and asks him to knight him! All the knight's companions start shouting to him to kill Arthur, and clearly he thinks about it, then touches Arthur's shoulders with the Sword, Knighting him, hands the sword back, and declares his loyalty. It's the single best depiction of the ideal of Chivalry I'm aware of in film

In addition to Williamson and Terry, add Helen Mirrin and the actor who played Galahad.

The whole Holy Grail sequence is a film in itself.

I always liked Yoda's "performance" in Attack of the Clones over the other movies. You can actually see the character thinking, reacting to dialogue around him, as opposed to having big moments (and yes I've blanked out the Light Saber duel with Dooku)

I'm not sure LOTR was such an unlikely success, given the times, and source popularity. A risk, yes. And certainly a miracle of audiences suspending their normal aversion to nerd fantasy;* millions watched an elf, a dwarf, a warrior, wizard and some whatevers in a nine hour asexual adventure through an imagination-taxing fantasy world. And liked it. Which is fairly amazing.

*As opposed to dreary female romantic fantasy, or repressed male fantasies about MMA or fast cars, or intellectual superiority fantasies, where the audience fantasizes that they're smarter than everyone else because the movie is winking obviously.

Great Advocate, Devin. Ironic, too, considering I just watched TTT EE just last week. My husband and I have made the LOTR series a Christmas tradition since 2004, when they were all released on DVD. The first year, we did a 12-hour marathon. After surviving that binge, we've chosen to make it a week-long event by watching 1 EE disc a night for 6 nights (this is also an easier option now that we have kids!).

Not wanting to get too overexposed, we may take this Christmas off. However, just reading your article takes me back to Dec. 18, 2001, and what an exhilirating, uplifting, mesmerizing time at the movies I had with Fellowship. You could hear a pin drop in our theater when the end credits started rolling. It was still one of the greatest movie theater experiences of my life.

I respectfully disagree with those who prefer the TT theatrical cut. I found that the most disjointed and impersonal of the 3 films, and the EE gave it emotional weight and (for the most part) provided better scene transition. FOTR EE is pretty good, too, although not much more so than the theatrical. ROTK EE is pretty bulky, but if you only watch one DVD a night, it doesn't feel so bad!

These are my two favorite moments too. I didn't cry when they told me my grandfather died, I didn't cry when they told me I had cancer, but I lost my shit like a little girl on fire during the Ride of the Rohirrim. Just lost it.

Well said Nooj, the success of Gollum was more than just Serkis and the CG dudes/dudettes hitting it off. The conflict inside him had to be real for Serkis to have something compelling to create, and that's what allowed the artistry of those guys to really fulfill their potential.

Davy Jones and Yoda are great, impressive looking characters but in terms of the holy grail of animation - expressing genuine, relatable humanity - they're just cartoon characters compared to Gollum. They are, like Justin said of Yoda, very solid and respectable accomplishments, but they're not as real as Gollum. And with Kong; say what you will about the storytelling in that film but I can't help feeling what that gorilla feels, and ironically he's more fully rounded than either of those more human characters.


Word. (All in good time of course, word on the street is a brand new Nunz is arriving NOW and our man will have his hands quite full for a bit).

Here you go, RD. No need for bloodshed.

The fellowship of the ring.

The two towers.

The return of the king.

Bless you, you Magnificent Greek you.

I agree with this - it's the one flaw in the EEs in my opinion. But it's still not enough for me to go to the Theatricals.

I only watched the theatricals up until the EEs were released and not one time since. Think I should give them a look again?

Sooo.. an unlikely success, then.

Bakshi's LOTR came out much closer to the height of the source's popularity and was a disaster. Yes, it generally sucked, but the property clearly has no guaranteed minimum return on investment, either.

A friend of mine worked for New Line at the time. I remember asking her what she thought of FOTR after a studio screening and she could barely offer an opinion because everyone was too nervous about how it was going to do. She thought it was probably good but she couldn't even enjoy it.

Re: The discussions about Gollum as a successful CGI character vs. all other CGI characters: I agree (as was stated above) that the source material, and the seriousness with which Serrkis and the CGI folk brought to the table, are what make the character so effective. Star Wars et al are just too light, in terms of their stories characters etc to be as effective.

One interesting factor in the movies initial success that I was pondering on the ride into work this morning: the movies really do a good job of portraying this all encompassing evil, with vast hordes of Orcs, the Nine, and of course Sauron. And at the time the perception by many people that the US was being attacked by hordes of Al Queda terrorists, governed by a weird religion that we didn't understand, from a remote mountainous region, was eerily spot on.

Yet in the years after, we learned (at least many of us did ) that there were no hordes, not every Muslin hates the US, and really the US was attacked by 19 lunatics who all died in the attack.

Yeah, but it also gives a great shot of Viggo when he thinks they wont' come fight with him. I think that's a better addition than the ambiguity of Army's position.

I think the animated movie comparison has a lot of problems. #1 being that Bakshi's version stunk. #2 being that animated versions rarely do as well. Look at the sales of Marvel and DC animated movies compared to live action versions.

Heck, Willow made $57 million domestic in 1988 dollars. If you adjust that for inflation domestically and figure in the rise in international markets and home video, LotR only had to match Willow's success to be profitable.

I just don't think "unlikeliest" sticks. An existing property with a large dedicated fanbase being turned into a special effects laden spectacle IS the basic model of modern Hollywood franchises.

Now, if you want to say that rolling the dice on three movies shot concurrently by a basically unknown director makes it one of the "riskiest" franchises all time, you'll get no argument from me.

Admittedly, we're arguing semantics here, but is any popular book really all that more unlikely becoming a popular movie than a movie based on an amusement park ride, for instance? Or the Harry Potter films still going strong, with the same kids, 6 movies in? Or a Holocaust film like Schindler's List?