Yes. Titanic was a better movie. Not even a close call.
Was “Titanic” overdone tearjerker stuff? Sure, and Star Wars was just a goofy space opera, and Pulp Fiction was… uh… pulp fiction, and Jaws was just a monster movie, and The Godfather was a gangster movie. Oh, and Fargo was a police procedural, man, you see those on TV every damn week.
What Titanic was, though, was a well done tearjerker. It was a clear cast of characters, a protagonist, a romantic interest (PROTIP: Rose is the protagonist) and so on and so forth. It told a story with a beginning, middle and an end in a fashion that was logical, well paced, well edited and well directed. The acting was good, and the visual effects were spectacularly good without distracting from the movie.
“The Return of the King” simply wasn’t a good movie. The story was not entirely coherent or logical, the pacing was not good, the effects get in the way of the film at times (and are, on a few occasions, downright silly) and the movie, rather famously, ends and ends and ends and ends. The direction was often lazy and overly reliant on CGI and green screens. I could point out fifty things wrong with it if I had the time. It just didn’t have the same sense of adventure and wonder as “The Fellowship of the Ring.” I realize the Academy wanted to reward Jackson for the overall achievement, but by picking ROTK as the movie to hang the awards on they gave it a lot of awards that particular movie should not have gotten.
(Of course, I know Jackson didn’t write the story and his ability to deviate from the tale was rather limited. When he did make changes they were often good ones, such as cutting Tom Bombadil. But whatever, the movie is the movie.)
[QUOTE=Chronos]
Did any of those films win 11 Oscars? Return of the King is a fair bit more than the “at least seven” bar you’re setting there.
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Er, I think you missed two points. One, Return of the King is not the “worst, best, and median” movie to win as many Oscars as it did, because two other movies won that many Oscars and were better movies. It can’t be all three, unless you think they’re all equally good.
Secondly, my point was it’s the worst movie to win a lot of Oscars. By “a lot of Oscars” we have to expand the pool past movies that have won eleven, and into movies that have won seven, eight or nine Oscars (no movie has ever won exactly ten) or else our statistical pool is too small to mean anything. Comparing it just to Ben-Hur and Titanic doesn’t mean a lot; it would hardly mean anything to say “I think these two movies are better than that one.” That would be a total cop-out. My point takes on more meaning if I am willing to say it’s not as good a movie as any movie that won at least seven Oscars, which is a reasonably good sample of movies, and includes a wide variety of films - Gravity, Slumdog Millionaire, Schindler’s List, Dances With Wolves, Cabaret, The Bridge On The River Kwai, and The Sting are now all in the conversation. So is Star Wars if you count the special award given to Ben Burtt.