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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.
Now with even MORE endings!
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But I think I'll watch the extended versions in the confort of my own home. Movie theaters don't have pause buttons.
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...
As with the two films before ROtK, I felt that there were places that were cut poorly, or didn't fit well together.
Once I saw the finished extended editions, they were a more pleasant experience.
After the "two-hour" limit is removed (even though ROtK was > 2 hours) it made a good deal of difference to the final output.
I expect that ROtK EE will be in the same vein.
Contrary to popular belief, life is not a bitch. It is far far worse.
The difference is that the LotR extendeds DO add to the film. That extra half hour in the past two added so much from the book that was cut due to time constraints. For people who love Tolkien's work, the extended is definitely the far better film, and seeing it in theater would be awesome.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
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.
...can go to Valinor whenever they feel like it. Frodo and Sam pass such a group in the extended first DVD, and in the books there's a much longer sequence involving them.
(And there's no rush; the "last ship" in the movies wasn't about to sail, because there was no last ship. Plenty of Elves were left in Middle-Earth, and Cirdan "sail all you want, we'll make more" the Graybearded just kept building the damn things...)
Galadriel, however, was special. She was the only remaining one of the Noldor who had been banned from Valinor. (The others were dead or had returned.) The ban was rescinded at the end of the First Age. She was still too proud for her own good, though, and refused to accept the invitation. Also, she was one of the first to rebel, so the Valar were not keen on letting her back in.
Once she had learned how to get along with others, and in reward for her work against Sauron, the invitation was re-extended to her, and she accepted. So in her case, yeah, she had to wait until she was ready.
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)