Review:Fellowship of the Ring

One of the best perks about my job is the excuse to skip out and catch the first showing of Lord of the Rings at the local theater. I did just that, and if you hit the magic link below you can read my comments on the film. I'm going to keep it short, and spoiler free. In a word? Wow.

Everyone has expectations about this movie. I imagine most of you have read the books. You all have ideas about what a Balrog looks like. What Gandalf is like. And yes, hell, even what the ring should look like. And you simply can't expect a movie to meet everyones ideas... but this thing came just as close as I could have hoped.

In short, there aren't many great movies that come out any more... but this is one of them. Everyone seems nearly perfectly cast. The special effects are nothing short of brilliant. The sets from the Shire on out look so wonderful and believable that you just wanna move in... until the Ring Wraiths show up and make everything all miserable.

Elijah Woods pulls off Frodo quite well. Yeah maybe he fell down one to many times, but the angst is believable. And Gandalf? His desire for the ring is intense and his actions are truly heroic.

I can't imagine a film adaptation of perhaps the best book ever written being done better. The first 45 minutes are a bit slow going, but once the Fellowship starts coming together I just didn't want to blink.

I could find things to nitpick about: some scenes the audio mix wasn't quite right, but that could partially have been the mediocre sound system in the theater: dialog was a bit muffled under the music. Some of the effects were noticably CG, but those were rare. Quite frankly nobody has done CG monsters as convincingly in a film to date. There was a handful of shots that looked faked, and all the rest seemed as perfect as could be.

God damn. The hype is warranted. The wait was worth it. But 12 months for the next one? At least I have my copy of FFX to keep me occupied during maybe 40 hours of the next 8,760 or so I have to wait. But who's counting?

Liv Tyler

[chemical55]

The movie is amazing and I'm not gonna go into it. (Just see it)

But Liv Tyler gets on my nerves. How dumb can somebody look? Her elvish was annoying and really took me outta the movie.

The One Ring?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmm....anyone seem to remember a Webring of Webrings?

"One ring to connect to then all, and in the Ethernet bind them..."

*wince* [Ducks myriad of popcorn and Glossettes from the back of the back of the theatre... [lordoftherings.net]

Yeesh. Sorry 'bout that...



What the hell, it's only Karma....

Re:Spoiler-free?

[Tumbleweed]

A spoiler would be like someone telling you Saruman is really Frodo's father, before you had a chance to see the movie. :)

Re:Spoiler-free?

[Anonymous Coward]

By wife, I assume you mean JonKatz.

Trailer

[DEATH AND HATRED]

The icing on the cake? The Star Wars EPII trailer!

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

How many times...

[doorbot.com]

...do we need someone Taco to mention he has Final Fantasy X?

At least I have my copy of FFX (from this article)
then play more FFX (slashdot://01/12/19/1356248 [slashdot.org])

That's two within 6 hours.

I wonder if you can still beat the game by simply repeatedly pressing the circle button. Call me jaded but the over-hyped FF7 was not that great; maybe I'm just not blinded by all the hype each time an FFn game is released.

Re:Spoiler-free?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Ever so slightly?" Bah humbug! Having Frodo gun down Gandalf as he's chased by the rolling rock I thought was a bit off, and as for the Bilbo Baggins dream sequence with "Bilbina Baggins"...

It was a wonder they didn't get Silvester Stallone to star quite honestly.

Re:My Review

[Chundra]

They eat seven or eight times a day, like to take naps, have never been far from home and have eyes that grow wide at the sounds of the night. They are like children grown up or grown old, and when they rise to an occasion, it takes true heroism, for they are timid by nature and would rather avoid a fight.

Good god! I never thought of it before, but you have just described the vast majority of the IT department where I work. No wonder geeks love Tolkien so much.

Re:My Review

[bmoyles]

Your review? Insightful? Hahaha
That's Roger Ebert's review from today's Chicago Sun Times.
hahaha

Re:Best Book Ever Written!?!

[sv0f]

Is there an O'Reilly book on LotR? What's the cover organism -- Gollum???

Re:My FOTR Review

[rizzo]

The next 90 minutes ? Were guys playing travel Connect 4 back there for the other (at least) 85 minutes? Although you didn't mention that she was back there too, so perhaps she was still driving and you were just punching the munchkin for an hour and half.

MIT girls will do that to you. ;)

Call me crazy...

[Enrico Pulatzo]

I know it sounds weird, but the addition of the Ewoks really made sense.

Re:My FOTR Review

[Hard_Code]

Ok, there really needs to be a peer to Godwin's Law which replaces "mentioning Nazism" with "prefacing the comment with a recantation of a lusty love affair the author had in their youth". Preferably this would be built right into the net, so such posts are automatically purged, and a squad of roughnecks with bats immediately dispatched to the author's place of posting. How about "Pygmalion's Law"...

I was fairly dissapointed actually

[Grelli]

I too made it to a midnight showing. And I sat through the first 2 hours of the movie, and loved every minute of it. Then just when I thought nothing could ever go wrong with the movie, it happened.

Apparently, the film that was being fed into the projector jumped, wrapped itself around something, locking a frame in place.

I saw a frame MELT before my eyes on the silverscreen. I now have a free pass to see it again. I'm in pain. Let's hope I have better luck second time around.

Re:My entire company is going

[chemical55]

Tell Mr. Jackson I loved the movie.

Another Generation of lusers

[The Ape With No Name]

My only bitch is that I will have another bunch of dweeb kids who want to have their username/password to be:


SunOS 5.8

login: gandalf
password: 6O11uM


Please, God. Spare me.

Re:Some nits

[micje]

Focus your hatred on a more traditional target. Peter is ready; AOL is making you wait.

Burn AOL!!!

Re:My FOTR Review

[Anonymous Coward]

Sooo... thumbs up or thumbs down?

Re:My FOTR Review

[RAVasquez]

I was just shocked to hear about a /. reader getting to second base.

Wherez Katz?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, where is Jon Katz' parallel review saying "They did not get the true flavor of the hobbits...Frodo was really more like an unloved geek and that doesn?t come through in this movie. All in all, good special effects, but really just another example of rampant globalist corporatism."

Re:Spoiler-free?

[Anonymous Coward]

All true geeks own oscilloscopes. If you're deprived there are skins for Windows Media Player that 'visualize' the sound and there's a Linux 'scope' application that uses a sound card.

But really, if you're a geek you want a big Dumont 'scope from the fifties in a steel chassis, that has bananna connectors for input jacks. Hooked up to your stereo permanently.

Overheard in Hollywood ....

[msm1th]

Jack Valenti: Gentlemen, we have a problem. I've been surfing some web discussion boards, and it seems that many idealistic Geeks and Nerds of the world are angry about the MPAA and the DMCA! They're calling for boycotts! What can we do?

Studio Exec: Don't worry, Jack. We'll just make some more flashy movies about time travel, robots, and hobbits. These so-called "idealists" will go nuts. They'll line up days in advance to purchase overpriced tickets. They'll brag to one another about how many times they've seen the movie. Then we can use the profits to give our lobbyists salary increases, and to bribe more congressmen.

Jack Valenti: Excellent ....

Wait a minute...

[nytes]

I wanna hear more about Denise.

Re:Elven text at the end of the credits...

[Anonymous Coward]

... no elves were harmed in the making of this film...?

-D.

Thank CHRIST they cut...

[Nathdot]

...Tom Bombadil, is all I have to say.

If LOTR had any "so on begat so on" bible type bits then he was it.

"I'm Tom Bombadil, Tom Bombadillo, something something something, now rhyme with 'Willow'"

In short GREAT CALL! He shat me.

:)

Re:My Theater Experience

[elmegil]

That's nice of you, but the rest of us have seen him in only two major roles, either one of which would be very jarring in comparison to him as Elrond.

I mean, can you imagine Elrond with a big Ostrich hat???

Re:My FOTR Review

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, this entire thread is about a fantastical, past history that never really happened...