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Will LOTR:ROTK Extended Edition Hit Cinemas?
yootje writes "Two articles today on TheOneRing.net about rumours that the extended edition from The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King will come in theaters before the release on DVD. The first article can be found here, the second one here. Both come from people who work in a cinema themselves, one in the UK and one in Denmark."
For those not familiar with the story...
Q: Is LoTR really based on Christian Mythology?A: Yes. Tolkien wanted to demonstrate that even the mentally and physically challenged were capable of success and that therefore we should love everyone, regardless of their defects.
Q: So who represents the mentally and physically challenged?
A: Well obviously the hobbits are the physically challenged ones here, but the central mentally challenged figure is Gandalf, responsible for the most horrible attack plan in literature.
Q: What's so horrible about a poorly armed team of two hobbits infiltrating Mordor?
A: Well, basically it ignores the fundamental strengths of the forces of light. Anyone who's played C&C or Warcraft knows that if you have an advantage in air units, you have to use it. Remember that elves can ride eagles, and that elven archers are incredibly potent - early on, Gimli dismounts a Nazgul with a single shot! With about a thousand eagles (given elven archers on each one), the forces of good would have matched up pretty well in the air against Mordor's air units: all nine of them. While the leader of the Nazgul cannot be killed by any living man, this does not prevent a team of twenty eagles from tearing him to little shreds, especially if Gandalf rode along for help. So basically an air battle would have been brief unmitigated slaughter of the Nazgul as about a thousand eagle-mounted elves blew them out of the sky in a hail of arrows.
Q: But I thought that there was some other book that said that the eagles wouldn't help?
A: We're not talking about some other stupid book here, we're talking about the Lord of the Rings. And in this book, the eagles most definitely help out, first by flying Gandalf off the tower and secondly by pitching into the Final Battle in full force, attacking ground units (stupid!) at great risk to themselves. So obviously they would have been content to take part in a brief airborne slaughter of the Nazgul.
Q: Ok so you defeat all Mordor's air units... then what?
A: Well with air superiority, you command the skies. Which means that you can fly right over Mount Doom and drop anything you want right in there... like a ring. Mordor only had nine airborne units, and with them out of the way Mordor has absolutely no way to prevent anyone from flying anywhere.
Q: But the ring would corrupt the eagles trying to drop the ring in, silly.
A: Actually, the ring can only corrupt those who touch it or those in the nearby area. This is a trivial mechanism to defeat. The first step is permanently bind the ring to a weak and helpless creature, like a rat. Second step is of course to put the rat on a long rope, so that the creature holding the rope is out of the sway of the ring. Then the eagle carrying the rope, having total air superiority, flies over Mount Doom and drops the rat in the volcano. An utterly trivial victory.
Q: Ok, so why the elaborately stupid attack plan? Why send the physical rejects as the only hope of mankind?
A: The lesson is that, though they succeed at great cost and great risk, they are still capable of success. This, of course, was the lesson of the Holocaust - that we should never feel so superior to the weak or inferior that we decide they have no place. Even idiot tacticians like Gandalf and weak, pathetic creatures like Hobbits can add some value here & there.
Q: Wait a minute. I just saw the movie, and there's this scene where they're like "this is the last stand of the Men of the West", and all the men of the west are white, and they face of in total war against Indians on Elephants and "black orcs" (er... maybe we just call them "blacks" for short) and the white Men of the West achieve a total genocidal victory. Doesn't that invalidate what you just said?
A: Well, um, no. That's all fine & good, but remember that in the Holocaust we were committing genocide against white people - which is bad. But I'm not sure Tolkien had a problem with what you describe above - as you said, it's in the book.
Q: So, basically, we as white western men should never discriminate against our leaders even if their tactics and strategy are totally flawed, because we are inherently good and will always prevail?
A: Exactly.
Hmmmmm... Makes me wonder... Will there be a special edition DVD for the theatrical release of the extended edition DVD?
Go here for teh [sic] funny.
Now with even MORE endings!
thelikesofwhich.com
until I can get the LOTR:ROTK WS EE DVD for my DLP HDTV - I only use DVI IC's for superior IQ.
Now they can show all three extended versions at your local cinema (for $10/movie) with breaks for lunch and supper. :-P
m'eh.. I'll prolly wait for the DVD.
Hope theres an intermission, or else a free catheter with every ticket. They should do what they did when it was originally released. They showed FotR EE, TTT EE and RotK back to back the day before RotK opened. That sold out around the country in a matter of hours. I'd be even more willing to sit through all 3 EEs in the theatre. With that said i'm still waiting on the RotK EE Platinum Collectors Boxed Set to go with my other two...
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
Extended edition? You mean I saw the short version!?
irb(main):001:0>
I am willing to bet there will be theaters which offer screenings of all three extended editions, back to back. Let's do the math:
12 hours of LOTR
+ Pshychotic LOTR-crazed fans
+ several hundred litres of movie-theater pseudo-soda
+ no catheters
-----
= one helluva carpet cleaning bill
and you can bet that those theaters will be full of psychotic LOTR-crazed fans... You can also bet that such a theater would be a great place to sell special movie-theater priced catheters to go with the special movie-theater priced colas...
No kidding. I could barely sit through the original theatrical release without having a theatrical release of my own.
The Spoon
Updated 6/28/2011
I hope they draw it out longer. A three hour nap just wasn't long enough.
(And no, sitting around while reading /. doesn't count. My sofa is very comfortable, thank you.)
Doing my level best to piss off the religious right wing...
That in 5 years we will have Lord of the Rings prequil trillogy and see the transformation of the White Wizard into the right hand of ultimate evil??
Wow, how many young-uns do we have around here?
There have always been long long movies. "Gone With the Wind" had an intermission in the middle (right after the "as God is my witness, I'll never be hungry again" speech).
Ben Hur, The Ten Commandants, Lawrence of Arabia, Doctor Zhivago...all are very long movies.
It's the media again. They think that only things are happening right now, as if for the first time to "make" the news. Like when these idiots go out on a live remote at an expressway in Chicago when it's snowing as if "what is this white stuff falling from the sky?!?! are the gods angry with us!?!?!". Gee, it's only been snowing in Chicago in the winter for what...10,000 years or so?
"Music is everybody's possession. It's only publishers who think that people own it." - John Lennon.
Well, sort of: in this version, Frodo isn't seduced by the ring just before he's about to throw it into Mount Doom. Rather, he still has it around his neck, and Gollum bites off his finger for no good reason.
Have you never heard of the Summer of George?
Go hug some trees.
My ass and bladder hurt just thinking about it.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
Only if the theatre has toilets instead of seats, or holds an intermission ...
"Because Science" is one step from "Because old book". Try "Because of my experiment testing my falsifiable assertion".
Don't work in software, do you?
Tink Kyew
The extended edition in theaters! Awesome. I can't wait to see it. Sitting there for over three hours. With no bathroom breaks. This is going to be...hey..wha...agh! Help! My bladder is trying to strangle me!
I recommend having a pause in the middle of the movie, we could call it something like an "intermission".
A new and modern idea like this one would allow people to use the washroom and buy refreshments in the middle of the movie.
Oooo! I know! We'll put it at the climax. just as the heros are crossing the Bridge of De... oh wait, wrong movie...
I'm all for anything that keeps all those loser LOTR fans locked up in a dark room for hours on end.
"Should I be on the edge of my seat for the 30 DVD LOTR box set?"
That depends, are you a fan of LoTR? I heard somewhere that if you aren't that interested in it, you don't actually have to buy it.
Actually, what I bet he's really wishing is that he'd PATENTED it.
"It takes a very long time to count to 2 in binary." ~'Fourlegged'
This is the way it should have happened...... Gandalf: That ring is bad news, Frodo, it must be destroyed. Frodo: How so? Gandalf: It must be placed in the fires of Mount Doom. Frodo: Oh well, I guess that means a lot of walking, camping and then running away from monsters, lots of death and almost losing all my friends? Galdalf: Nah, I know some big eagles that can fly us straight to the mountain and we can drop it in the lava. We'll be home by tea. Frodo: Nice one!
Y'know with Gandalf driving around in the ice-cream truck warning of impending doom
They eventually began to shrink in stature and began to live in the trees, taking up occupations such as shoe cobbling and baking.