May 9, 2002

Re: Critisisms of the FOTR Movie
Kailam

I have to agree with Bob on some of his gripes. Particularly, the gripe about character/plot/scene development. I think everyone has pretty much said that character development and scene setting was very lacking and made the whole movie seem "rushed". I'll grant Jackson that, in this day and age, producing a REAL epic movie in the proportions of Gone With the Wind and others may be too risky and ultimately would fail in making a profit. With the attention span of today's audience, I am amazed that people can find it in themselves even to sit through 3-hour movies like Green Mile and FOTR. Sadly enough there's no way to create a movie that runs for the 4-5 hours necessary to adequately introduce and develop the world of Middle-earth, and have it be a successful mainstream movie.

Granted, most of us fans would GLADLY sit through 1 or so more hours of FOTR to get that extra development and plot (how many of us Star Wars freaks would stay up all night watching the full trilogy for 6+ hours). But Jackson opted to actually make MONEY on his film, and therefore had to cater to the masses and the fans at the same time.

I haven't heard or seen much about the extra footage on the DVD, but I feel like the Lothlorien scene did orginally have a lot more to it than what finally made it to the big screen. I get the impression that Frodo's "flashback" of Galadriel giving him the gift of the Light of Elendil (I may have slaughtered that name, I'm very bad with names - sorry!!) was originally a full gift-giving scene that had to be cut down and turned into a flashback during editing, purely to save time.

All that being said, I would hope to one day see a SECOND version of FOTR, much like the (severely misguided, but well-intentioned) re-release of Dune by Universal, in which many of the deleted scenes are put back into the movie (of course, we'd want them fully edited and run through post-production, unlike the restored scenes in Dune). I'd pay to see 'dat. Hmmm... maybe we should start a petition!