I read this described elsewhere as his “They have a CAVE troll. Of COURSE they have a cave troll. Why WOULDN’T they have a cave troll. God, I hate Mondays” scene.
Irks:
Gimli’s comedic relief scenes. “Not the beard!” “Never toss a dwarf!” “Don’t tell the elf!” Give it a rest, dude.
I know that this is my own thing, but casting Hugo Weaving as Elrond so soon after the Matrix just kept me expecting to hear “Mr. Frodo” in that Agent Smith voice.
Some of Legolas’ lines are hysterical in their ridiculous melodrama.
Pleases:
Far, far too many to name. The handling of Smeagol’s back-story, the flashback handling of The Hobbit in the very beginning so that the 1 person on the planet who didn’t know the story would get up to speed quickly, the Shire, the beacons…
That’d be me. I thought the ring was a force for good. I knew nothing about the story. I’d seen “Frodo lives” graffiti but had no idea who Frodo was. I think I knew a hobbit was a short person. I’d heard of the books (even bought them for my kids) but thought they were sorta like Watership Down.
Oh, I dunno. The slope at Helm’s Deep didn’t look much steeper than this, and the Eorlingas are the best horsemen in Middle Earth. And they have the best horses, too, even aside from the Mearas.
Irk: Entmoot. I was so looking forward to seeing it the way it happened in the book, watching the hobbits as they listened to the sound of the Ents debating and discussing for days, hearing the rise and fall of their voices from a distance, building up to their final decision…
… and then suddenly the forest erupts with a gigantic “HOOM-HAH!” and the March of the Ents begins. That would have been awesome to see. Instead we get a walking tree in denial, and then when they finally do attack Isengard, it’s an unplanned mess, rather than the coordinated and deliberate invasion Tolkein wrote about.
Likes: Gollum. Gollum was absolutely perfect. Love me some Gollum. I also like the bit where Aragorn arrives at Helm’s Deep after receiving the Kiss of Life from the horse, and he pushes open the double doors and staggers in, looking oh so hot. And Pippen’s song in RotK makes me tear up every time.
That reminds me: when the Ents tear down the dam, the way they made the water all muddy and dirty as it swept all of Saruman’s filth down into that hole was pretty fantastic.
There’s one thing that bothers me in ROTK that I haven’t seen anybody mention before.
When Gollum is talking about the stairs of Cirith Ungol with his reflection in the puddle of water, gravity is pulling his hair straight down, as it should. But the hair in his reflection is not falling at the same perpendicular angle, the strands ought to be shown as following through on the same alignment. Instead it’s as though the puddle is tilted 30 degrees like a mirror leaning on something.
As Gandalf took his dive off the bridge, Aragorn is stuck watching him fall in sheer benumbed disbelief. You see the whole world go to hell in his eyes. But when the others start screaming at him to get his ass back in gear, he does immediately, and then he casually ducks under one of the arrows that was fired at his noggin. He’s torn apart by what has just happened, but he still has the presence of mind and clear head to briefly bow his head to avoid a piece of steel through his skull. A tiny moment, but unfuckingbelievably great.
But wasn’t it described as the “Great City” of the dwarves, or something? What city? Where were the buildings and houses and stuff?
Compare it to the amount of detail and thought and beauty that went into the Elven cities, and it really seems like they (the filmmakers) just ran out of time and energy.
Or are there descriptions in the books that match those shots really well?
Most of the ones already mentioned, especially “Legolas! What do your elven eyes see?” and “You will taste Man-flesh!”
Especially, though- where the everloving hell do their horses go in the last battle before the Black Gate? Where? Why? Why did they miss it?
Pros:
Most things. I love the costumes. I would have given a couple of fingers or an arm to work on them. I think, by and large, the movies were fantastic, and I’m very happy with them.
It’s hard to steer this thread away from a “changes from the books” thread that’s been done so many times. So I’ll just add: I was hoping for a much more bad-ass Gimli. I would’ve loved to have seen him hoist an axe over his head, give the Dwarf battle-cry (“Barak khazad! Khazad ai-menu!”) and cut an orc in half. Didn’t happen.
Pippin & the palantir. If PJ had shot what Tolkien wrote, actually giving Sauron some lines, it would’ve been awesome…instead of just wrestling with a flaming bowling ball.
Likes: not only do I like the elves at Helm’s Deep, I love one particular shot: where they all snap to attention and turn their heads in perfect unison. Just another “elves are different” moment.
PJ & his partners were hit-or-miss with their dialog. Some of the lines they wrote (as opposed to JRRT) are real clunkers, but some of my favorites are theirs: “It comes in pints?” “I don’t think he knows about second breakfast”…and “You’re his bodyguard?” “I’m his gardener”.
The Mines of Moria that the Dwarves call Khazad-dum were huge with great halls and long passages. The Goblins roaches was just assinine but the huge chamber itself was not out of the possibility from the descriptions that Tolkien gave. The Bridge was a bit off but reasonable.
By ‘City of the Dwarves’, it meant that the chambers were large and finely wrought and the population was large. The largest population of Dwarves at its height that Middle Earth had ever seen.
In the days before the Balrog arrived, Khazad-dum was well it and beautiful. The Balrog was woken in 1980 third age and Khazad-dum was abandoned by Dwarves shortly after. So the Moria you saw was a Moria that was the realm of Orcs, Trolls and a Balrog for over 1000 years.
Most of the movie Johh Rhys-Davies is struggling just to lift his axe above his shoulder; a lot of the “blows” he lands wouldn’t dent the skin of a Boy Scout. Given how uncomfortable his makeup and costume were for him, that’s understandable, but Aragorn gets some Vorpal cuts, so why not the dwarf…
I can never grok the geometry of the entire staircase-bridge scene. Gandalf and Aragorn are at the very top landing, and Gandalf gestures towards the bridge, which is maybe 300 feet away and about 20 degrees lower than where they’re standing, seen lengthwise. After they manage to navigate the collapsing stair, they scramble down a vertical distance of oh 200 feet, go through an archway (with Balrog in full pursuit), and across the bridge. There’s NO way that initial shot makes sense, at all; if it was at all visible they should have been looking almost directly down on it.
