Kevin's Watch

Yeah, the duchess is right. Apart from her ignorance over the brilliance of the Ralph Bakshi version.

No doubts for me. The first movie was the best. It's smaller scale (i.e. no armies) allowed for some awesome choreography and cinamatography. The fight scenes were brilliant.

The large scale sequels make for a blurred and confusing visual experience IMO.
Yes, the effects are great, but there's little or no chance to study individual events.

--Avatar

Avatar wrote:No doubts for me. The first movie was the best. It's smaller scale (i.e. no armies) allowed for some awesome choreography and cinamatography. The fight scenes were brilliant.

The large scale sequels make for a blurred and confusing visual experience IMO.
Yes, the effects are great, but there's little or no chance to study individual events.

--Avatar

I think you're right, I watched them all again the other day. And i found myself liking the first one more... I used to like the second one more... but Theoden's arrogance annoys me way too much for me to really like that one.

I prefer the first. Because in that one, Jackson pulled in more of the nice little characterizations that Tolkien put in the entire trilogy. And TTT took too much time on the siege, not enough on the people... I mean, apart from Gollum (wow) and Sam and Frodo... where he *has* to look at the characters. But on the other threads... not enough

I suppose FOTR was the easiest though, since it wasn't split into three different threads.

Isildurs Bane wrote:Yeah, the duchess is right. Apart from her ignorance over the brilliance of the Ralph Bakshi version.

Ignorance is bliss, as far as Ralph Bakshi is concerned.

Lord Foul wrote:Ignorance is bliss, as far as Ralph Bakshi is concerned.

Amen to that.

I think FOTR was the most well-done of the movies, and Boromir was alive through most of it, so that's a plus. Great writing, great effects, great acting... just great.

My favorite was TTT, because so much happened, and there were not so many dead horses as in ROTK. The music for the Rohirrim sequences was great, too. Of mixed opinion about the Elves showing up in Helm's Deep (dead!Haldir - ack!) but it was nicely done.

*gets on soapbox*

ROTK... ugh. Rates way down there on the "dead horses" scale, not to mention the "gruesome horse deaths" scale, the digital work was so blatantly digital that I'm not sure why they bothered (both sequences with the betrayers' ghosts were cheesy, I'm sorry), and the writing was dreadful. "A diversion!" - No, really? We've only spent the last two minutes of screen time discussing it... I have some hope for the extended version *cough* Mouth of Sauron *cough*, but other than that... *shrug*. And it's rather sad, because ROTK was my favorite of the books.

*gets off soapbox*