LOTR
 

What? No Lord of the Rings talk on Cellar? I'm dissapointed.

Actually, I couldn't bring myself to see it. I'm taking an enormous amount of flack from my peers because they forced me to see the first movie when it was released in the theaters. When we walked out, my opinion of it wasn't praising it to high heaven, so I was treated as an outcast in the local geek community. Oh, no!

Now, I never read the books -- it is really rare that I can read or watch anything that has various classes, species, and a caste system for elves, dwarfs, and fairies. Since I don't know what the books are like, maybe that is why I didn't enjoy the movie.

I sat for three hours, watching what my friends proclaimed to be a masterpiece of a film and prompty fell asleep for the last 45 minutes of it. How can anyone sit that long for a movie?

The final movie, I've been told, is 3 hours, 40 minutes. Sheesh. I work in IT and sit all damn day. I simply can't bring myself to sit another four hours!

I saw it last night with my gf and a friend...

We all agreed on one thing : TOO DAMN LONG!

I won't spoil anything, but the movie is 'over' at least 40 minutes before it 'ends'. There is a lot of "Oh look they're hugging and reunited....awww" People in the theater were laughing whenever the screen faded to black and instead of the credits yet another scene showed up. The ending is tediously painfull, people were walking out in packs at that point.

Overall I'd say that the movie could have been easily cut down by at least an hour and a half. Lots of "Look at the cool castle!" scenes and pathetic attempts to draw some emotion from the audience.

Overall, had to see it I suppose. Not at all impressed. Wished I rented it so that I could have had a nice food/drink break in the middle.

What really scares me is that the 'directors cut' will probably include an additional hour of footage...ugh

I am in disbelief that many people called in sick, today, to go see the marathon. Yep -- all three movies in a row with short intermission breaks inbetween and more than ten hours of sitting with your feet glued to the floor by some spilled soda.

More than ten hours of staring at movies with buttery popcorn and sugary soda. Please tell me that no one with young children went to see this set -- crying babies will be murdered where they sit.

Heh.. I can't imagine sitting through all three. (I like the books and liked the first two moveis; I plan to see the third this weekend.) What really amuses me about the whole business is the way LOTR has become mainstream thanks to the movies, when, back during my salad days, association with any of that fantasy stuff was considered the height of nerdity. Oh, well, maybe it just means we're all nerds now.

Nah we're not ALL nerds till they start making movies based on Asimov and Clarke books....real SciFi not the A.I. "I'm a kid!" bullshit.

Considering that it's that long WITHOUT including the most critical part of the third book (the Scouring of the Shire), I'll pass.

Nah if the Shire was wasted then they couldn't have had the 1 hour ending showing the jolly halflings drinking beer in the shire

I'm gonna go but I am disturbed that the Shire will not be molested. There is a great lesson in that part of the story about the effect of war on the home front but we'd hate to confront that today, wouldn't we?

I've said it before and I'll say it again -- I like the books too much to watch their movie adaptations. Even with ten hours and three movies to play with, I know I'll feel like I'm watching Lynch's "Dune" all over again -- seeing a stream of identifiable scenes and situations from the books, but missing out on the extraordinary (and unfilmable) level of detail that made the books excel in the first place.

Hell, I'm still waiting for an authentic "Fletch" movie. LOTR is several orders of magnitude more complex than that.

Sorry to disappoint OnyxCougar but from what I hear Peter Jackson never filmed the Scourging of the Shire, as he never liked that chapter, so it won't be in the extended version. Saruman will be in the extended version, though.

I went and saw it yesterday. I have to say I liked it - for what it was. I'm a huge fan of the books. And I'm also a huge fan of the movies - but I consider the movies Jackson's interpretations of the books. I have really tried to keep them separate.

I'm neither a huge fan of the books nor the movies.

When I saw the Two Towers, I was really enthused and thought it was awesome, but I thought about it the next day and I decided that it seemed too thin. I was also disappointed that the 'big thing' of the movie, Helms Deep, was hardly even mentioned in the book (I did manage to find that chapter, though!).

I stopped reading The Return of the King about fifty pages after the Ring was destroyed. Aragorn and whomever walked through a garden for nearly all of those fifty pages, and I became bored.

I didn't see The Matrix Revolutions, I have no plans to see The Return of the King (although I might see it), and I will not see Star Wars 3. Does that make me a heretic?

--
Griff: Perhaps people will witness the Scouring of the Shire when they read the books -- although that limits it to the people who can/will read.

Re: LOTR
 

Actually, you may be disappointed, but you shouldn't be surprised. Nobody said anything about Matrix Revolutions for quite a while, until Elspode started a thread entitled "Isn't Anyone Going to Say Anything About Matrix Revolutions?".

I thought Return of the King was <i>the</i> coolest movie I've ever seen in my entire life. It's a perfect 10 in my book.