RotK Delayed Until May 2004

An anonymous reader writes "New Line Cinema's The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, will be held for domestic release until Wednesday, May 12, 2004. The effects work on this third and final film of the trilogy will surpass its predecessors in scope and intensity, and the producers as well as director Peter Jackson feel that the extra time will cement the film's status as the king of fantasy films and the crowning jewel of New Line's massive effort to bring J.R.R. Tolkien's epic to the screen."

Comments

sigh

[Anonymous Coward]

i can't wait till today is over :-\

Also, they can fix the Plot

[weston]

Also, they can take the time to go back, re-read TTT and ROTK and correct all the plot problems they introduced in TTT.

When Faramir turned out to be "Boromir II" I nearly walked out of the theatre.

How did they get the first film so right and the second one so wrong? *pounds head against wall*

Re:Also, they can fix the Plot

[Anonymous Coward]

I attempted to walk out. Supposed 'friends' held me back from doing so.

About the only enjoyable things about the Two Towers were the ents (which were tastefully done, even if their scenes were a bit hasty. Hoom, hoom.).. And Theoden not quite getting into the entire 'Arise! Arise!' schpiel.

Where's Narsil? Why is Aragorn so damned whiny about taking his throne, where in Tolkien's writings, he was flashing the blade that was once broken all about like mad?

What, in the name of Mandos, were the elves doing at Helm's Deep?

Who will bring Arwen's standard to Aragorn now that Haldir (who seemed a little chunky for an elf) had a lobotomy?

Oh, and what's with Gollum's eyes? They're about ten times the size of everyone else's. Gollum would almost be 'realistic', if not for that.

I will not comment on what Jackson did to Faramir, other than to say, the man has obviously not read the works of Tolkien.

Perhaps he ordered a set of those cheap knock-offs of popular books, that you can get from Taiwan. You know, the ones where they make up crazy shit and call it the new Harry Potter sequel?

You know it's fake

[Winterblink]

Because if it was real there'd be like 2000 comments by now. :)

Re:what

[gilroy]

Blockquoth the poster:

I thought April Fools jokes were supposed to stop at noon.

Ah, but that's the April Fool's meta-joke....

Re:This is a Hoax.

[geekoid]

How many good ST movies since Slashdot began?
hint: )

I wish the delay were real

[Adam J. Richter]

I wish this announcement were not an April Fools joke. Fellowship of the Ring was cut much better than The Two Towers. I think that the cartoonish special effects to represent the Ents was probably also the result of a too tight schedule. I think that with a little more time, the Ents probably would have been redone, and a more careful viewing of the movie would probably have resulted in removal or replacement of some of the credibility-destroying scenes, like when Legolas became a skateboarder in the middle of the battle for Helms Deep. I also think the comic relief by Gimli should and would have been toned down a bit.

There was nothing that I can recall in the original theatrical release of the Fellowship of the Ring that made me cringe (some of the material that in the Extended Release did, but that largely shows what a good job of editting was done in the Fellowship of Ring theatrical release). In comparison, there were several places in The Two Towers that made me cringe.

Re:what

[Naikrovek]

yep, and ya know what? news organizations aren't supposed to play april fools jokes. its unprofessional, and if they're this cavalier about journalistic integrity, then how much more integrity do you think they have the rest of the year? (clue: the answer is 'not much')

to me, the sheer volume of april fools jokes today, the duplicates that happen every week, the spelling mistakes that happen in 4 of 5 posts PROVE to me that this site is one giant year-long april fools joke.

Re:They started screwing the plot up in Fellowship

[noewun]

The thing that especially bugs me is that if only Jackson had bothered to read any of Tolkien's writings outside of LOTR, I doubt that he would ever have butchered the story like he did--TTT, especially, isn't even in the spirit of Tolkien. How hard would it have been for him to read Tolkien's Of Fairy Stories which sets out what he believes are the important elements of a fairy story--elements that Jackson totally left out. Further, Jackson should have read some of Tolkien's writings on Anglo-Saxon literature, and should have read some Anglo-Saxon literature himself, so that he could have had an understanding of the type of literature that influenced Tolkien--if he had done that, he wouldn't have totally screwed up the people of Rohan, for one.

If you would watch the director's commentary footage on the LOTR DVD, you will find that Jackson and the two other writers have thoroughly read the Tolkein cannon for many, many years and, in fact, are very well versed in Middle Earth. What many of the people who are bitching about the movies don't realize is that a movie is a very, very different beast than a book, and making a movie requires a very different type of storytelling.

There are four main issues which require major changes when going from book to movie, and on issue specific to LOTR:

1) Time. Most people have a hard time sitting through a movie longer than three hours, which translates into about 180 script pages. On a movie the size of LOTR, a unit is lucky to shoot about half a script page a day, and, when the scene involves stunts, one minute of screen time can take three weeks of shooting time. A movie which translated all of the events in the books to the screen would be, literally, too long to film, and much too long to sit through. Cuts had to be made.

2) Story-telling paradigm: Books are (duh) a verbal medium, which means that, in many ways, novelists can be very lazy story tellers. Readers will forgive pages of interior monologue, long descriptive scenes, and characters who have relatively minor roles being given large chunks of attention for short periods of time - as the reader visualizes the story in his/her head, there are no time limits necessary. Film is a visual medium, which means that something has to be happening on the screen at all times in order to keep viewers interested, and, because of point 1) stories need to be streamlined so that the storytelling never bogs down. Tolkein's writing has a habit of taking grand digressions: at many points in the story Gandalf or Elrond or whomever will completely stop the action and retell some part of Middle Earth history, which, while it throws some light on the story, would absolutely completely kill the momentum in a movie. Because much of the intricacy of Middle Earth comes from these digressions, these had to be cut or reinterpreted.

3) Character is handled very differently in the two mediums. The first rule in any storytelling is to have characters the audience wants to watch and wants to care about. As already stated, books have the luxury of time and tropes not available to film: Gandalf can spend three pages telling us of the plight of the Dwarves and, from this, we can have a deeper understanding of their motives. In film you don't have this luxury, and you really have only three ways to develop a character: dialog, action and visual symbolism.

Many people have complained about the enlargement of Arwen's character and role in the movies. This was necessary because of the constraint of film. In the books Arwen doesn't actually have that much face time - much of the information and emotional impact of Arwen and Aragorn's relationship comes from Tolkein's historical digressions and knowledge of the past of Middle Earth, specifically the story of Beren and Luthien. There was absolutely no way to fit this information in the films while maintaining a watchable narrative flow: the action would have to be stopped to explain the plight of Elves versus men, the Doom of the Val

Re:Hoax

[mink]

D.N.F. says to me "Did Not Finish"
Sadly it works on so many levels.