the fellowship of the ring

[pauraque_bk]

A friend of mine finally convinced me to watch the first LOTR movie, though I've never read any of the books. There were a number of things to like about this movie: the acting was good, some of the images were striking, and it's obviously a solid story.

The directing, unfortunately, was terrible.

The movie went from ponderous and repetitive in some places, to jerky and too fast in others. Jackson seemed unable to handle the most basic of scenes. Even when we're just watching two characters converse, the constant jump-cuts and awkward angles and zooms make it impossible to follow or get engaged. I wanted to like the movie, for the reasons I gave above, but the amateurish directing just made it tedious to watch. I was glancing at the clock every couple of minutes. I can tell that there's an excellent movie to be made from this material, but the one Peter Jackson made was definitely not it.

Am I the only one who felt this way? Have I suddenly come down with attention deficit disorder? Somebody clue me in.

Comments

[deslea.livejournal.com]

No, you're not alone. I thought it was one of the worst films in recent memory.

[pauraque]

Phew, glad I'm not the only one. I've seen a wide variety of very bad movies, but this one was uniquely frustrating in that so many talented people were putting so much good stuff into it (the actors and the special effects crew, certainly -- Gandalf facing off against the Balrog could have been a tremendous scene), but it was all for nothing due to the director's poor style. If they'd hired any half-competent TV director in Hollywood to work on the film, it might at least have been watchable.

Have you read the books? I wonder if perhaps being already familiar with the story is what made people able to follow this film.

[maidenjedi]

Well, my reaction to your reaction is that you need to read the books. Jackson's direction *is* all over the place - but in that, he's being very true to Tolkien. Just wait. If you read "The Two Towers", you'll really notice it. There are chunks of it that had me ready to throw the book at the wall, whole clusters of dialogue that had be itching to red-ink the passages, and it took real commitment for me to get past the first half of the book and into the action and decent pacing of the second half.

I'm sorry - I just realized there's a good chance that I've put you off the books entirely. It's not that they're bad, or badly written, or anything like that. It's just that I'm picky and I notice those little things. I think you'll see why Jackson directed the films the way he did.

(though, honestly, I didn't notice the lapse in the first film the way you did - I noticed it a lot more in the second one, which is odd, because I enjoyed the second one even more than I did the first, and I'm notoriously hard on directors and editors)

[pauraque]

Well, you're right, you haven't really make me keen to read the books. :) I just don't think they're for me, though I can understand why people get into them. I was intrigued by the way magic was portrayed, as something non-discrete and closely tied to the user's force of will. Quite different from how it's put forth in HP, of course.

My friend was very surprised to find that I didn't like the movie -- he laughed, actually... thought it was completely uncharacteristic of me. I guess I'm full of surprises....

[deslea.livejournal.com]

I agree. The pace was horrible. I thought it was one of the slowest movies I'd ever seen. And my flatmate at the time loved the thing and got a pirate DVD of it within a couple of weeks of its release and played it on a big-screen projector over and over again for months. Ack. Drove me nuts.

I have read the books, but so long ago that I can barely remember them. At the risk of literary apostasy, they didn't do that much for me, except possibly for The Hobbit. I don't feel especially eager to read them again.

[(Anonymous)]

I'm a big Tolkien fan, but I have to admit that Jackson is a shitty director; or, at the very least, he has a bad editor.

[pauraque]

I really wonder how he got the job. "Meet The Feebles" -> "LotR". Huh?

[archanglrobriel.livejournal.com]

If you can ante up four more hours of your life, get your mits on the special extended edition. It adds about five minutes to every scene and several scenes drop into place that make the overall flow much better. The unedited version makes the whole movie a much smoother ride.
I've got a copy if you want to borrow it, you're welcome to drop by and pick it up. ;) And hi there. I added you.

[pauraque]

Hm. My instincts tell me not to spend one more second of my life watching this movie, let alone an additional hour... but you could be right. Maybe I will borrow it sometime, when curiosity overcomes me.

I've added you too. And I got your email; I'll be responding later tonight.