On Friday the 13th, The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug will be released in theaters. Like the Hobbit film to immediately precede it, this new flick (only the second of three) likely promises to be a shamelessly padded, cynical cash-grab from a studio and from filmmakers who are trying to milk every last drop of Lord of the Rings lucre out of a cow that died somewhere about a third of the way through The Two Towers.
Welcome, dear Ringers, to the latest edition of Trolling, the CraveOnline feature specifically devoted to making you feel bad about the things you love. This week, as you can see, we’ll be ripping heartily through the chest of that most beloved of geek institutions, Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings movies.
Currently spanning a whopping 14.8 hours (and that’s not counting a sixth film, or any of the ultra-extended director’s cuts), Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings movies have, since their first release in 2001, been considered by fans to be a new vanguard in cinematic entertainment, and a revolution of acceptance in a new wave of geek-friendly culture. The movies were instantly adored by fans, lauded by critics, awarded heavily by the Academy (Return of the King got 11 Oscars!), and changed Hollywood from a one-picture-at-a-time machine into a let’s-plan-an-entire-franchise-at-once machine. They are referred to in grandiose and sacred whispers, the assumption being that, well, everyone just loves them.
Of course, in the eyes of Trolling, none of these piddling details mean a thing. If something is overtly and widely adored, well that makes it suspect. Let’s look past all the hype and love, and look at the movies themselves. Are they still good? Indeed, could it be that they SUCK? Yes, we declare that The Lord of the Rings SUCKS. Let’s delve.
I do have to admit the ultimate ambition on display with The Lord of the Rings is nothing short of miraculously impressive. The nerve and hard work required to bring any project of this then-unprecedented size to the big screen displays a kind of tenacity and moxie that most filmmakers don’t approach. But overall, the films are long, busy, drawn-out effects extravaganzas that don’t impact emotionally, and don’t really stick in the mind. They play like a single over-long special effects demo reel that just happens to have Christopher Lee in it.
Until next week, let the hate mail flow.
Witney Seibold is a featured contributor on the CraveOnline Film Channel, and co-host of The B-Movies Podcast. You can read his weekly articles Trolling, Free Film School and The Series Project, and follow him on “Twitter” at @WitneySeibold, where he is slowly losing his mind.
Lord of the Rings SUCKS!
Could it be that the universally adored and lauded Lord of the Rings movies aren't good? Could it be that they suck?
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The Story is Boring
For a series of movies that takes longer than several grand operas to complete, the story is startlingly simple, and most certainly didn’t warrant the time it took to complete. The story in a nutshell: A haunted piece of jewelry is making monsters come to life. To stop the monsters, the jewelry must be destroyed. The only way to destroy the jewelry is to dump it in a volcano that is far away. A hobbit walks a long way and dumps the jewelry into the volcano. Done! The film, then, is essentially a string of unimportant happenstances that distract the hobbit on the way. Wars, battles, monsters, eagles, wizards, trolls, balrogs, Gollums… all that stuff is extraneous, and only gussies up a simple and pretty rote fantasy story. There are better and more efficient ways to tell this story.
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There's No Main Character
I want to say that Frodo Baggins is the main character of The Lord of the Rings… but he is absent for large portions of it. Indeed, he doesn’t witness most of the events, he’s not told about them, and completes the quest without the aid of most of the other characters. His only major character change is that he decides to leave home, and that happens in the first movie. The other two Frodo films are all about Aragorn and his quest to, uh, win back his old kingdom or something, and then marry a hot elf chick who is way older than he is. Aragorn’s drama is more political, and it has no bearing on Frodo’s ring quest, and feel like a distraction. Gandalf dies at one point, inviting some sort of engaging personal drama (you’d think resurrection would be a big deal!), but he never rises to the role of central protagonist. All the other characters seem to be comic sidekicks.
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Boring Look
I hate the way these movies were designed. Peter Jackson, instead of inventing an original look that was distinctly his own, or perhaps drawing all his visual clues from the original novels, opted instead to design the Lord of the Rings films after paintings and posters and fantasy book covers from decades of nerd collectivity; The hazy, fairy-land, unicorn, fire dragon, elf warrior visual milieu of D&D manuals, fantasy comics, and truly unsettling slash fiction. I was never comfortable with that look. It was too misty. Too risible. It didn’t make otherwise epic tales of knights and hobbits seem anything more than adolescent daydreams of bizarre physical perfection (what are fairies and elves beside perfect spank material for nerds?). And this was something we had to look at for 14+ hours. I feel like Ridley Scott’s (goofy-ass film) Legend beat these movie to the punch, but did it better.
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There is One Theme, and It's Misinterpreted
What is the central theme of The Lord of the Rings? What is the story really about? Well, since all of the war stories were totally extraneous, they must be ignored in terms of theme. That means the central story was destroying an evil ring, right? The ring, mind you, is a cursed object that turns you evil and ambitious and obsessive. In the case of Gollum, it transformed him into a pasty obsessed newt man of some sort. The theme, then, must be a warning against obsession. A cautionary tale about allowing a single object – even one that you perceive to hold power – to take over your life. And what do fans of Lord of the Rings do? They obsess about the object of their affection. They dress in costumes, log onto online forums, and turn themselves into the Gollums that the movies are pointedly arguing against. Oops.
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The Movies Missed the Richness of the Books
J.R.R. Tolkien was, as is pretty well-known, a linguist before he was a fantasy author. He was obsessed with language and linguistic structure (he was especially fond of Finnish). The Lord of the Rings was a ripping fantasy yarn, but more than that, it was a literary attempt to construct a fictional history, a group of imaginary cultures, and a good deal of imaginary languages. It was never about the story. It was about the place. Despite endless flashback exposition on the history of Middle Earth in the movies (which was, at the very least, a pretty good try), they never really feel like a mellow travelogue through a distinct and distant country. The movies care not for culture or campfire stories or songs. They’re too eager to pepper things with happenstance, battles, action, and way too much structured narrative detail. Cut out 90% of the fight scenes, and replace them with long scenes of laughter, meals, and campfire songs, and you’ll see what richness the source material truly offered.
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Andy Serkis is Overrated
Everyone loves Andy Serkis as the off-screen avatar for Gollum. Gollum was a CGI creation that was voiced by Serkis, and whose movements were based on Serkis’ on-set cavorting. I admire what Serkis did, and I have nothing to gripe about the CGI approach of the Gollum character (in a fantasy world, it’s okay that a character look a little special-effects-y). But what Serkis did could have been accomplished by any expressive actor, and calling for Oscar nominations for the man is off-base. It’s the effects that brought Gollum to life. You wouldn’t care about Serkis unless the effects weren’t good enough to convey the facial expressions of any actor. What’s more, the Gollum voice is a little grating. He sounds less like a monstrous creature, and more like a hyperactive Peter Lorre.
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Forgettable
At the end of the day, I can perhaps recall about 30% of these movies with any sort of palpable clarity. This may be a fault with my memory (which I admit might be the bulk of the problem), but I think my lapses also speak volumes to the clunky and haphazard way these movies were made. There is so much happening on screen, so many subplots, so many damn characters running around with their own agendas, that it becomes overwhelming after a very short time. And all of that when it's not even the central dull story. When the 26th character is introduced, and the fourth battle is about to begin, the mind just starts to haze over and tune things out. I have had conversations about these movies with friends (who have seen the films multiple times), and they refer to events and characters that I cannot recall for the life of me. After a while, I start replacing characters’ names with characters from Labyrinth. It’s the only way to keep track in this over-stuffed traffic jam.
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Too Violent/Boring
As I mentioned above, the books were a gentle travelogue. The movies were all about action and violence and battles and war. In one of the wars, there are giant elephant monsters. I think there are eagles in another. Someone surfed down stairs on a shield, I think. I like a good action sequence as much as the next guy, but a good action sequence becomes a bad one after a finite time. The Lord of the Rings definitely exceeds that unwritten time limit, and the battle scenes go on and on and on and on and on. All of a sudden, we’re watching a swirling vortex of character-shaped objects wailing on each other for no dramatic end other than to distract you for another 20-45 minutes. Am I the only one who gets easily bored by the notion of too much action? I hate that crap.
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Any Women Around?
There were three (3) central female characters in this film that I recall with any clarity. One was a pretty elf warrior who doesn’t fight in any wars and who cries a lot before nearly dying of, um, a broken heart. One was also an elf who was Cate Blanchett. There was another woman who killed a guy declaring “I am no man!” I understand this is supposed to be a parallel medieval universe (I think… read on), but surely there are more women who could have joined this 50-man sausage-fest. No wonder people accuse the film of being really, really gay. It’s all men. Women hardly appear at all. That’s not much of a complaint, I admit, but it’s something that’s very noticeable.
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When Does it Take Place?
This is a complaint about fantasy literature in general: When, in the course of human history, is this supposed to take place? Judging by the technology, it could anywhere in the 13th or 14th centuries, right? Perhaps I’m looking at this too practically, but I’m a little uncomfortable with this repurposing of known history. I’m fine when King Arthur has his adventures, because that’s based on ancient literature and bits of fact here and there. And it’s fine to add dragons and wizards to that mix to add magic to the myth. But The Lord of the Rings is too recent and too fantastical for me to ignore the fantasy stretch, and I find myself asking inappropriate questions instead of enjoying the movie. Is Middle Earth another planet? Another dimension? Can Regular Earth access this dimension? At what point did Regular Earth and Middle Earth split? Do they share a common history up until a certain point? Ooh... Maybe Middle Earth was the alternate dimension created by the dinosaur meteor in Super Mario Bros.!
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Lame Humor
Gimli is the comic relief. He isn’t funny. That is all.
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Too Long
This is a common complaint, and can perhaps be gleaned from the arguments above, but I’ll just state it outright: These movies are too long. Just too long. There’s too much of them. It shouldn’t take any filmmaker this long to tell these stories. They’re too drawn out. Jackson went a little too hog-wild with his freedom, and didn’t know when to edit. One film could have done the trick. Heck, three two-hour films would have been tolerable. Six films that approach (and sometimes surpass) the three-hour mark is too much movie for anything.
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Too Many Endings
You all know about this one, so I’ll just bring it up again. The multiple endings in The Return of the King were, I do realize, supposed to be the cap of a nine-to-twelve-hour epic. So there had to be a lot of them, right? No. No, no. Just wrap things up. I’m good. I don’t need every thread tied up. I just wanna get out of here.
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What They Are Trumps How They Are
This argument skews a little theoretical, but I think it’s a salient point, so I trust you’ll indulge me (I mean, you’ve come this far, right?). I have a feeling that the Lord of the Rings movies, along with other recent franchise products (Harry Potter, Marvel superheroes, Twilight, etc.), are lauded less for how they are as movies, and are celebrated endlessly for the very fact that they got made at all. Even if you feel the Peter Jackson films were at all good in any capacity, you’ll have to admit the more impressive feat is a marketing and studio wrangling one. Peter Jackson managed to get this long-unmade movie made! But he didn’t necessarily make a great film. He made something fans anticipated for years just well enough. In my mind, I sense there is a truly great Lord of the Rings movie existing in an alternate universe that is better paced, more moving, more memorable, and just better made than the ones we got. We were just too distracted by this thing’s very existence to really be objective. The films exist more as an event than as films. And I’d rather see a film than an event. Does that makes any sense, or am I going insane?
