LOTR: The Two Towers

Let's try to mash all the LOTR submissions into one. Reviews: comingsoon.net, Empire Online (UK), CNN, Slate, Salon. The LA Times has a story about animating Gollum which we can't link to because it requires registration. Lord Satri writes "Ents, elves and mages being on every orc's lips, new versions of Tales Of Middle-Earth are available. It is an open source, one player and online multiplayer game. It is ported to many OS's. Yeah, no terrific graphics, but the game is really worthwhile. It is based on the famous roguelike Angband (variants here). Faithful to Tolkien's writings."

Hmm

[archnerd]

I can't resist the urge to make the first non-anonymous post on this thread, but I'm going to try to keep this from being totally meaningless by suggesting that so few comments are being posted because everyone else is busy seeing the movie. /me kisses his karma goodbye.

Coming tomorrow (or maybe later today)...

[csnydermvpsoft]

Let's try to mash all the LOTR submissions into one... by CmdrTaco

I already saw it - Spoiler

[pmacwill]

the eyeball did it.

Re:I'm a geek...

[mstyne]

since I bought my tickets on 11/27/02

Precisely why I was too afraid to go to the midnight showing. I'll wait a couple weeks until the scary people aren't going anymore.

Midnight showing

[SL33Z3]

I wonder if the people at Verant received an all-time low in their log-ons of Everquest -- all their geeks were out for three hours watching this thing :)

BIG SPOILER

[pulse2600]

Gandalf comes back!!!!! OMG

He didnt mean it.

[irc.goatse.cx troll]

If CmdrTaco really wanted to cram all of these into one, He'd include the dupes planned for tonight and just link everything twice.

Re:I'm a geek...

[Anonvmous Coward]

"I've had my ticket confirmation print out pinned to my cube since I bought my tickets on 11/27/02.
Now my anxious salivations are almost to an end though...in just 6.5 short hours, I'll be in the theatre when the film roles! (insert evil laugh here)."

Just think: LotR's revenues would double if people brought dates!

Exit Polls

[SL33Z3]

I would like to have taken an exit poll of how many of the people at the midnight showing had Everquest accounts. If you wanted to take Sony/Verant/989Studios down, all you would have to do is bomb all the theaters last night. It would have taken out most of their customer base :). As a plus, from the looks of it, you would have killed Hot Topic's sales too!

Re:Make sure not to wait till next week.

[JJAnon]

the guy who did the acting for Gollum should definalty win Best Supported Actor from the Oscars

Did he really have to wear a jockstrap all the time?

Re:ents...

[Cap'n Canuck]

how good do the ents look?

All depends on what you find sexy in an Ent. I'm a trunk man, myself...

Faramir got jobbed (SPOILER)

[KMitchell]

I saw it last night at midnight and really liked it.

My biggest complaint with the changes from the book was that Faramir was turned into a pretty weak character. I did get a nice chuckle when Sam said something along the lines of, "We're not even supposed to be here," while in Gondor as I was thinking much the same thing.

I wanted to go see it last night!!

[nexusone]

But the guard at the theater would not let me in with my broad sward and plate mail armor......

Insert more quarters Elf is about to die!!!!

Re:I'm a geek...

[Anonvmous Coward]

"Once on opening night, and once a few weeks later when she agrees to go."

Heh. Anybody else read that and get an image of Steve Urkel saying "I'm wearing you down baby!"

Re:No LOTR Logo/Icon?

[Foxxz]

Haha, though it said LEGO. And yes, LOTR DOES need its own LEGO set :)

-Foxxz

Help

[Exmet Paff Daxx]

Hey one thing I've never understood about LoTR is why the forces of light didn't attack Mount Doom from the air. See, they had over 10,000 giant eagles, and you could have mounted an elven archer on each one. Mount Doom was undefended from the air, and only the Black Riders could fly. So it would have been 10,000 against nine.

Instead, Gandalf sent two of his weakest soldiers on foot. I can only assume he was suicidal or an agent of darkness... does Tolkien cover this in a sequel?

Anyway, I'm going to play "Tom Bombadil" and sing a song of protest on my way into the theater, so I don't have to pay the evil MPAA.

Re:dvd

[theguru]

Wait, this is Slashdot. Don't you mean, "I can't wait until the copyrights expire and it falls in the public domain so that I can watch it without somehow contributing to an evil empire of corporations out to make money from the helpless consumer"?

Re:So...

[digitalsushi]

So what was the consensus on Picard's and Guinan's relationship? It's not fair to keep us hanging!

From the slate review

[wiredog]

I loved this line:

If I have misspelled or mischaracterized any of the above, please send corrections to [e-mail]

Re:Make sure not to wait till next week.

[jebell]

I give the movie 9/10 and the guy who did the acting for Gollum should definalty win Best Supported Actor from the Oscars. Thanks. It wasn't easy, was it, Precious?

Re:No LOTR Logo/Icon?

[simetra]

I've been saying this for a year now.

Please, oh please make a LOTR topic so I can ignore it!!!!!

Thanks

My own review

[Dark Paladin]

Based on the one I wrote [gamerspress.com] a year ago and posted on Slashdot, here's my own take on the newly released The Two Towers [gamerspress.com].

Personal Note

I'm not big into spelling characters names, so if I've misspelled Ghimli or Aragorn or WhoFrigginGivesACrap, please forgive me for not rushing home to open the books and get every letter in the right spot - if you know the stories, you'll know whom I'm talking about.

Get Your Elf Ears On

About a year ago [gamerspress.com], I made a bet with New Line Cinema. I put up $10, scheduled my time to see the midnight showing of The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring with a bunch of geeks. I mean, we're talking the kind of folk who make their own chain mail, call each other pussies if they haven't read the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy once a year and can't talk Elvish, and girls that are hot. Look, I'm sorry to sound sexist, but geek girls are hot. (Trust me - the smarter the girl, the better they shag.)

I basically bet New Line Cinema they couldn't do it. They couldn't translate Tolkein's epic work into a movie format - even at over 2 hours long. There was too much, the actors would surely suck, and the only reason to go to the midnight showing was to poke fun at the geeks who showed up in their cadaver wax Elf Ears.

Well, the joke was on me. The Fellowship of the Rings turned out to be the True Shit - the kind of movie most Hollywood types can only dream of making. A movie that is, as near as I can figure, perfect: perfect acting, great timing of the plot, special effects that are so subtle you sometimes don't realize they're there, and an attention to detail that would make a compulsive counting accountant weep in envy.

But one year later - could Jackson and his team do it again? The Fellowship turns from the story of a small band of would-be heroes (and the fodder for just about every role playing/fantasy epic that ever existed), into the gigantic tale of war, treachery, and conflict - both great and small.

And while the movie has it's weak points, I think it's safe to say that Jackson still has the power to entertain on a level that should make just about every other hack director piss his pants in fear.

Ass Kicking in the Underworld

If you haven't seen the first movie, then you are boned - there's no introduction, no "here's what happened before" - it just takes off with Gandalf getting thrown into a pit, and takes off running.

For a three hour movie, the first 90 minutes of it hit the ground running faster than Richard Simmons on crack. We quickly see Frodo and Sam, the two remaining members of the former Fellowship still trying to fulfill their quest: take the One Ring to Mordor and destroy it before the all-evil Sauron can get his grubby mitts on it and use it to bring in a reign of terror worse than the Steve Balmer developers video. Frodo is sliding into e-vile as the Ring gives off its Evil Rays into its brain, and it's former owner Golem is hanging around them, guiding them to Mordor in the hopes that he can be reaquainted with his "Precious" once again.

Meanwhile, the multi-racial League of Heroes - Aragorn the human, Legolas the tree elf (so sexy I've known Geek Girls to take up residences in trees hoping to find their own tree elf), and Ghimli the Comic Relief - wait, I mean Dwarf, long of the axe and the source of most of the movie's humor. (I have the feeling that the Height Challenged segment of the population might have a bone to pick on how Ghimli is the butt of most of the jokes here - about height, short women, height, inability to ride horses, height, burping, and don't forget - height) - are trying to track down Hobbit-napped Merry and Pippin, two small people captured by Orcs to be taken to the evil Sauroman.

And what is Sauroman doing? Well, he's amassing the biggest baddest army to ever exist to kick everybody's ass to make up for all the times he got shoved into a locker in Wizard's School, and that Potter kid got all the credit. With his orcs killing everyone in the nation of Rohan, his aide Wormtongue keeping the Rohan king under evil possession, and using lots of conditioner to keep away split ends from his long, white locks, Sauroman looks like he's going to put him and Sauron on top of the heap.

Before you know it, there's major wars being fought, the return of fallen hero (and let's face it - if anybody hasn't read the books and still doesn't see this coming after all the previews, they should be surprised when I say Gandalf comes back), giant tree-like people called Ents are working their mojo in the forest, and Aragorn is getting the hot looks from not one, but two good looking women - and one's even Elf based. How hot is that?

Geeks Enter Here

The good news is that the pacing is excellent. There was only one moment about 3/5'ths of the way through the movie I found myself looking at my watch (during the long Elf dialogue scenes), but otherwise, it doesn't feel like a three hour movie. You're kept moving right along, no time to get bogged down with all the people and events hurtling by. It's not too fast of a pace either - each scene gets exactly the amount of detail and explanation it needs - no more, no less. This is not a movie where you're told 15 times some crucial piece of information - you should have gotten it the first time, and if you didn't, you'll figure it out on your won later. (Unlike another movie [gamerspress.com] that had to tell you no less than 5 times every 5 minutes about the planetary alignment happening once every 5000 years.)

The movie is still targeted at Geeks themselves - they'll eat up all the details about people and places that most mere mortals will go "huh?" at, like when a character announces "Look, the Mystical Knights of Rayearth have passed by!" (All right, not literally, but you get the idea.) There's lots of names to pass around (and what was up with some of the names? We've got Aragorn, Arwen, Aowen - man, it's surprising that the characters don't get confused and launch into a Who's On First segment sometimes), but you don't have to pay attention to that - most people will get the gist and ignore it, while Geeks will be creaming their pants that Jackson got their favorite detail right.

As far as the acting - it is still as flawless as the original. There's not a scene where anybody feels out of character, or like their just standing around with a sword in their hand waiting to head out to their air-conditioned trailer. Every single actor in the movie - from the main cast down to the stand-in's - plays their role so well, you're convinced this isn't a movie you're watching, but some portal into another history that might have existed. And once again, Ian McKellen proves that he's still the best damn actor out there. His portrayal of Gandalf is spot on - one moment just another old man, full of compassion and slyness, the next second the ass-kicking terror in White. Do not get on this guys bad side, or you'll wind up worse than Mike Tyson's last date.

Look, Mommy - It's Computer Generated!

If there's one major complaint about the movie, it's in the special effects. 80% of the time, they're perfect when used to describe scale. When you first see the Black Gate and realize this fucker is huge, you can't help but just go all Keano Reeves as you breath "Woah!". Or as you look in the twisted forest, perfectly rendered, or the caves beneath the earth, or how our heroes get dirty, bloody, dusty, and generally look like they've been through the ringer.

The main problem with most of the effects is that we know their effects, unlike the last movie where the effects were so subtle, sometimes you didn't realize it was a trick until it was too late. Here, we've got computer generated characters in the form of Golem and the Ents running around the place, or the giant computer generated armies that just don't quite look right. They look good - but there's a level of reality still lacking, some quality that triggers our brain that this isn't real, and dissolves that suspension of disbelief just a little bit.

And sometimes the effects seem to be there just for effects sake - like when Legolas makes the coolest "around the horses neck" mounting of a horse ever, or another scene where Legolas goes down a flight of stairs skateboarding on a shield shooting arrows. Cool? Sure. Necessary? Maybe, maybe not. With all of the conflict going on, you feel that maybe 5 minutes could have been cut out of the movie. Then again, if action's your thing, you might wish for another 5 minutes to watch Aragorn keep up his Superman impression, taking on nearly an entire army of 10,000 orcs on his own with nothing more than a pair of chopsticks and a can of gasoline. Wait, that was from an episode of MacGuyver - my bad.

Then there's the looks of the characters. It's like the old Westerns, where the Bad Guy always wore a black hat. Here, if you're Evil, you're ugly. No good looking baddies here that make women's toes curl [ohtori.nu] - bad guys seem to sprout warts, moles, slime, bad teeth, and a horrible case of gangrene all over their skin. On the other hand, good guys are usually sexy, even if you're a hobbit (I've had enough Geek Girls let me know that Frodo Baggins is close to winning Sexiest Man Under 5 Feet of the Year for the second year running).

Macro and Micro Conflict Systems

What really makes this movie special is more than just the retelling of The Two Towers adapted for the screen. If there's a theme running through the whole movie, it's about Conflict, on the Macro and Micro scale. There's the obvious Macro conflicts - giant armies pitting themselves against the other, the survival of mankind itself at stake. We see up close the effect this war has on people as women and children flee their villages, boys hardly old enough to sprout facial hair being put in armor, handed a sword, and told to go die for their people.

The army scenes are impressive. Once again, Jackson plays the sense of scale beautifully, and when you look out and see 10,000 orcs ready to attack, all you can think is "Damn - the humans are so fucked." Wars are shown to be the confusing, messy and random events that battles become, even if the good guys seem to be able to take out 100 baddies for every goody.

The micro conflicts are the true meat of this movie. Frodo against the corrupting power of the ring. Golem fighting against his own evil nature. This part was probably the best, as we see Smeagel, the man that Golem once was, try to fight his way back to the light. For the first time, Golem becomes more than a slimly froggy bogeyman. He becomes a creature deserving of our pity, proof of what any man will become once the Ring gets its hooks into you far enough.

We see Aragorn and Arowen the Elf deal with their separation, and the realization that only unhappiness may come of their love, since he'll be dead within a century, and she will walk the Earth forever to grieve for her lost love. The conflict of father over his daughter's safety and happiness, or the conflict of a leader uncertain how best to serve his people.

And of all of Jackson's achievements for the movie, it is the micro conflict that is the greatest effect of all. It makes so many of the characters more than just figures on the screen. It gives them humanity, a reason to cheer, to suffer, and to fall right along side them as the events of destiny hold their sway.

Once again, Jackson has created this years best movie - and there's still another 12 months ago before we meet the climatic ending of the trilogy. Personally, I'm already planning on plunking down my $10 to see the next one. After all, it's no longer a bet - it's now a sure thing.

As always, I'm John Hummel [mailto]. And that's my opinion.

Re:Faramir got jobbed (SPOILER)

[zmalone]

Hobbits - The Movie Sam: Something like 36. Frodo: Something like 36? Including me? Sam: Um, no. 37. Frodo: I'm 37? ... Frodo: Try not to suck any dick on the way through Mordor!

Re:Make sure not to wait till next week.

[plasm4]

Perhaps they'll even let him star in his own sitcom.

Re:Faramir got jobbed (SPOILER)

[fr2asbury]

That reminds me of when Disney adapted Winnie the Pooh, and they were having some trouble with Pooh being stuck in Rabbit's hole (it's a door, you perves). They invented the Mole character who pops up and says "I'm not in the book, but here's my card."

Jonathan

Re:No LOTR Logo/Icon?

[Anonymous Coward]

>I'm thinking something round here, with a diameter of maybe 1.5 cm or so..

OOO! OOO! I know this one!

CMDRTACO'S COCK!

Have to say it...

[jaeson]

One Submission to rule them all, One Submission to find them,
One Submission to bring them all and in the Slashdot bind them

today...

[Skraut]

I know yesterday we hated the MPAA. Today TTT gets released, so movies and the movie industry is great. That means tomorrow we can resume our regularly scheduled MPAA bashing.

Re:No LOTR Logo/Icon?

[halo8]

EEEHHH!!!!

THATS MY KARMA YOUR WHORING!!!!

you TRAMP
you SLUT
you TROLUP
you FLOOZY
you WENCH

YOOOOOUUUU YOOOOUUU WHORE!!!!!! YOU!!!

Re:Midnight showing

[Asprin]

When I was in college I briefly delivered pizzas for Domino's. One month, their corporate newsletter had a sidebar describing how the Washington D.C. franchises could tell when something important/catastrophic/ominous was happening because orders to particular government buildings went through the roof as people worked late.

Re:I'm a geek...

[owenb]

You're going within 3 days, alone, so you can get a good spot? I hate to tell you this, but you are not avoiding them. You're one of them.

Re:My 'No Spoiler' Review

[AgentTim3]

And, although I really liked the Ents I felt they got pretty short shrift scriptwise. Maybe there are some cut Ent scenes that will show up in the TTEE (Two Towers Extended Edition) DVD when it comes out.

Geez, the geeks always gotta focus on the titties. Never stops.

In full....

[mav[LAG]]

Three submissions for the trolling missions, daring the Reply
Seven for the editors and their brains of stone
Nine for portal ads doomed to die
One for the dark Katz and his dark Tome
In the land of Mordoration where the mod points lie
One Submission to rule them all, One Submission to find them,
One Submission to bring them all and in the Slashdot bind them
In the land of Mordoration where the mod points lie

Re:No LOTR Logo/Icon?

[SensitiveMale]

If any one has any Logo Designs of their own..

How about a middle-aged geek using GIMP to put nipples on Arwen while his life is slipping away?

Re:So...

[Anonvmous Coward]

"So what was the consensus on Picard's and Guinan's relationship? It's not fair to keep us hanging!"

It died down after a crack Picard made about Guinan's face resembling that of Shrek.

Re:Spolier?

[Anonvmous Coward]

"You want a spoiler?
You will die alone."

I don't know what's worse. Your reference to Star Trek V, or that I get the reference.

the illuminati did it

[Anonymous Coward]

I heard there were not one but two black helicopters parked on the roof as well. I also believe space aliens were interfering with the screening using astral projection.

Re:LA Times (no registration or pop-ups!)

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course no one at this point has considered that LoTR:TTT is merely a teaser for the Special edition DVD due out next October. With an extra hour of footage that actually makes the movie more like the books and a free set of steak knives it's something not to be missed!

Re:Two points.

[Hackysack]

"So... true... but than again, "geek" isn't precisely the same thing as "smart"."

So true, as the comments here on slashdot remind us all on a daily basis.

Elves do not skateboard

[Fricka]

Thank you, that is all.