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Review:Fellowship of the Ring
Everyone has expectations about this movie. I imagine most of you have read the books. You all have ideas about what a Balrog looks like. What Gandalf is like. And yes, hell, even what the ring should look like. And you simply can't expect a movie to meet everyones ideas... but this thing came just as close as I could have hoped.
In short, there aren't many great movies that come out any more... but this is one of them. Everyone seems nearly perfectly cast. The special effects are nothing short of brilliant. The sets from the Shire on out look so wonderful and believable that you just wanna move in... until the Ring Wraiths show up and make everything all miserable.
Elijah Woods pulls off Frodo quite well. Yeah maybe he fell down one to many times, but the angst is believable. And Gandalf? His desire for the ring is intense and his actions are truly heroic.
I can't imagine a film adaptation of perhaps the best book ever written being done better. The first 45 minutes are a bit slow going, but once the Fellowship starts coming together I just didn't want to blink.
I could find things to nitpick about: some scenes the audio mix wasn't quite right, but that could partially have been the mediocre sound system in the theater: dialog was a bit muffled under the music. Some of the effects were noticably CG, but those were rare. Quite frankly nobody has done CG monsters as convincingly in a film to date. There was a handful of shots that looked faked, and all the rest seemed as perfect as could be.
God damn. The hype is warranted. The wait was worth it. But 12 months for the next one? At least I have my copy of FFX to keep me occupied during maybe 40 hours of the next 8,760 or so I have to wait. But who's counting?
On the same token, why bother to discuss the plot since everyone knows it?
This counts as a review?
No kidding it was spoiler-free; it was content-free as well...
There's a somewhat less mediocre review on kuro5hin. In the comments, there's also links to way more in-depth reviews.
I saw it last night, read a bunch of reviews this morning to see what everyone else was saying and the best review I read is on IMDB.
eh? um...
So this isn't Jon Katz?
*walking away* You mean I wasted my witty Slashdot banter for nothing?
NO! Insolent FOOL!!!! Galadriel is DEFINITELY in the first book! Think elves in the forest??? Ring a bell? The mirror? the elven ring? FOOL! You don't DESERVE to watch the movie. :) jk...but it is in the first book and you should be ashamed. hehe.
The previous comment was not meant to be inflammatory or insulting. Get over it.
The anti-salmon
You must be joking. Ever heard of "War and Peace"? The Bible, the Torah, the Koran? "The Fall", by Camus? I think you need to broaden your perspective.
Final Fantasy had no plot
LOTR (the books) has quite probably one of the `deepest` plots ever in a book.
If they managed to strip all the plot from the movie, I doubt it would be getting all the rave reviews.
Nosce te Ipsum
Anybody else sick of Taco raving about how easy he has it playing video games and waiting for a movie to start playing?
Somebody lookup the link to the article on addiction and e-mail it to Taco.
Ok then, just warn the people with aol email not to read the review.
love is just extroverted narcissism
Re Boromir, thanks a lot. Might want to put spoiler warnings up next time.
Kevin Fox
Excuse me, I may be trolling but give me a goddamn break! Best book ever written, hmm, yeah, leave out, ohhhhhh.... Dostoyevsky, Milton, Whitman, Marquez, and a about 100 others who outshine Mr. Tolkien like diamonds against mud. Oh, so only English/American authors? Okay, I'll take Kerouac, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Whitman. What? Only fantasy/Sci-Fi with epic battles? Alright, Asimov, Herbert, and ooh ooh, I got one, Homer! Can't forget Beowulf, there's some sword-swingin' action for ya!
If LOTR is your idea of great literature, go take a comp lit class or something, please, spare us all. Oh, and Tolkien's poetry is some of the worst you'll see. Use it as a model to avoid.
"Life's funny sometimes." "And sometimes it isn't." --Cat's Cradle
Firstly, I did get up at 3AM in the morning to catch a place in line for the first 11AM show. There must have been a line of nearly ten people already there! Some had sleeping bags, and the person at the front of the line even brought along an ice fishing tent. So, needless to say that getting up was definitely worth it. By the time 10:30AM rolled around and they started letting people in to buy tickets, a total of TWELVE people had gotten there about ten minutes prior to the opening. Boy was I lucky that I came so early, the line was HUMONGOUS. Anyhow, I'll cut to the chase.
Elijah Wood played the role of Bilbo Baggins quite consistantly with the book The Two Towers by I.B. Token, and I must say that his battle with the evil man-witch Frodo in an effort to guard the sacred cock ring was extremely valient and breathtaking. The character called Sauron, the whimsical good wizard played by William Shatner begins to turn evil after his desire for large erections gained by wearing the magical golden cock ring. I must say that the finale; the great circle jerk that concludes with all characters in a magical "sword" fight, followed by the final struggle where the cock ring is lost forever. All in all, The Hobbit was an excellent cartoon, and I would reccomend it to anyone in the mood for a light comedy with a hint of light drama.
Ok, there really needs to be a peer to Godwin's Law which replaces "mentioning Nazism" with "prefacing the comment with a recantation of a lusty love affair the author had in their youth"
Especially if that love affair was with a naked and petrified Natalie Portman...
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
Oh my. Oh my. I am astounded - very nearly wordless. CmdrTaco, your review was just so amazing... amazingly thoughtless and inane. I forgive you, because I expect you were too busy giving head to the studio execs to write something intelligent. Fellowship of the Ring sucked. 3 hours of the worst bullshit ever perpetrated on the world. Not once, from the very beginning, was that tripe true to the novel. Oh, you did know there was a novel, right? I suggest you go to your local bookstore and actually read it, you dumbass. I do not recall the ringwraiths setting out for the Shire immediately after Bilbo's birthday in the novel. I do not remember there being a hair-raising, Hollywood-esque chase through the night to the ferry, with Frodo heroically leaping to across the water at the last moment, barely escaping the wraith trailing behind him (apparently Hobbits are faster that horses...). Perhaps you remember Tom Bombadil? Or the Barrow-Downs? Or a certain letter left for Frodo by Gandalf at the Prancing Pony? And what the fuck was with that battle he had with Saruman? DEAR GOD. Is the only power those two have that of telekinesis? If they fought at all, it would be a battle of wills, not some shitty nonsense with them throwing each other against walls. And the palantir! Oh, the palantir! What the hell was the director thinking? That wasn't even supposed to be known until the 2nd book! But I forgive you for not knowing that - after all, you didn't even read the first book, let alone the others. Oh, there's more, so much more to say... Strider just happening to have 4 Hobbit-sized swords to just hand out when needed (what a fucking shitty workaround for the Barrow-Downs, too), fighting off, what was it, five Nazgul on his own, with just a sword and a torch?! Some stupid Elfen princess bitch showing up out of nowhere to bring Frodo across the river?! THEY INTRODUCED A NEW CHARACTER. HOLY SHIT. I have to stop now, I'm getting too pissed. I just have one last thing to say, though: next time you decide to write a fucking review of a movie, do the world a favor and drown yourself in a toilet first, ok?
And what, praytell, to do you do with an English-Lit degree?