Raised By Wolves

 Thanks to having some access to HBO, I've checked out the first episode of Raised by Wolves, a science fiction show that feels like it's an adaptation, but is in fact an original work. It's odd, in this day and age, to feel like that distinction is important for genre television. A little over a decade ago, my sense was almost always that television was original stories, with film being the medium for adaptation. But today, after Game of Thrones, the idea of adapting novels to TV has really caught on, especially for books of a longer variety. My favorite sci-fi show in recent years, The Expanse, is an adaptation of (the first two-thirds) of a novel series (apparently the last trilogy takes place long after the first six books, so it was a natural stepping-off point).

In a strange way, not being an adaptation introduces a sense of trepidation - TV shows often go off the rails after starting with a bold and solid few seasons, and there's a certain comfort to knowing that a series is already known to conclude well, and that all it needs is a proper translation. Indeed, Game of Thrones is a great example of this - once the showrunners ran out of novels to adapt, the general consensus is that the quality of the show took a nose dive.

That's all sort of meta-commentary, though. Let's talk about Raised By Wolves.

I think one of the reasons it comes off as an adaptation is that this seems to be introducing some heady stuff.

We begin with narration from Campion, a human child who is born (of a sort) and raised on Kepler 22B, a distant planet. Earth is no longer habitable, and there's a division between two factions: the Mithraics and the Atheists. Mithraism, if you're unfamiliar (I only know about it because of an Early Medieval History class I took in college) was a popular religion in the waning days of the Roman Empire, and historians generally think that it stood a good chance of spreading across Europe if Christianity hadn't spread faster. It's not obvious if this is an alternate timeline or a far-future in which Mithraism was rediscovered, but what we know is that the Atheists lack the power and resources to launch a true ark-ship to take humans to this new world, and so instead they send two androids, known as Mother and Father, along with human embryos for the androids to grow in artificial wombs.

The world they arrive on is not lifeless - there are planets and the massive bones of serpents. Mother and Father technologically gestate the embryos and ultimately raise the children on this world.

One of the oddities of the world is a large number of sink-holes that seem bottomless, and it's into one of these that the first of the children to die falls. Mother and Father try to do their best to educate the kids and protect them, instilling in them a fervent distrust in anything resembling religious faith, but despite their efforts, the other children succumb to some kind of wasting disease, and in the end, only 12-year-old Campion is left.

When Father spies a Mithraic ark-ship orbiting the planet, he intends to signal them to ensure Campion survives - their mission to found a new human colony cannot continue, as there is only one male human left, and so he does this to at least protect their one remaining child. Father's attempt to access their ship - which was stuck about fifteen feet down one of those sinkholes, almost ends in disaster due to a fraying rope, so Father resolves to try again later, but then Mother confronts him about what he intended to do. Father is unable to persuade her, and she kills him, impaling him on the teeth of the giant serpent skeleton near their settlement.

However, Campion goes into the ship and manages to contact the Mithraics, who arrive not much later. Mother attempts to pass herself off as a human (taking the name Lamia, which is a monster out of Greek myth,) but her ruse is fairly transparent, and the Mithraics who have arrived there resolve quickly to take the boy.

This, though, seems to activate some deep-hidden power within Mother, which allows her to horribly kill two of the Mithraics. She then steals the last one's shuttle and goes up to their ark-ship, where she seems to be able to make people explode with a scream. She forces the ship into a collision course with the planet and then takes a group of children from within the ship back on her shuttle, arriving back at the settlement when the ship - which may contain the last of humanity aboard - crashes into a mountainside.

There are... about a million unanswered questions here. But the show strives for an I think achieves a mythic feel to it (the pilot at least is directed by Ridley Scott, who's pretty good at this sort of thing).

What I find really interesting is the possibility for unconventional mythological homage. While much of this does seem to be fairly Biblical in inspiration - two parentless adults raising what is meant to be the first of a new humanity in a, for a time at least, untouched world, not to mention a big ophidian motif - I'm really curious to see to what degree Mithraic mythological references are worked in.

It does also seem pretty grim - and we'll have to see how draining that is as the show goes on. But I'm definitely curious, which I think is a pretty important thing to evoke in a pilot.

The Legend of Vox Machina

 I'll be honest, I wasn't sure whether to post about this on this blog, or Altoholism, my gaming blog.

Yesterday saw the launch of The Legend of Vox Machina, an animated series adaptation of Critical Role, which is a prominent Dungeons & Dragons "actual-play" stream. For almost seven years, this group of voice actors has livestreamed their D&D games, first through Geek & Sundry and later as their own company on Twitch and YouTube.

Unlike streaming, say, a video game, D&D is a highly narrative-focused game, with many (most in my experience) groups inventing an original story that they play through.

For those unfamiliar, here are the basics:

Using the game's rulebooks, players each create a character that they will play as - picking things like race and class, so you could be a Half-Elf Rogue or a Gnome Cleric. These choices determine the various abilities a character can use while they adventure as part of a party (i.e., the other players) in a fictional fantasy world, generally engaging in heroics and, just as often, shenanigans. The rest of the world is run by another player, referred to as the Dungeon Master (or Game Master, the term used more broadly for other, similar games). This player doesn't have their own character exactly, but tries to draw narrative threads, describe the fictional world, arrange for exciting monsters for the party to fight, and plays the many other "non-player characters" or "NPCs" that the party comes across.

In most cases, the game is designed to tell ongoing narratives that could last years, with players meeting together for a few hours once a week (Critical Role's Thursday night sessions tend to go 3-4 hours).

In effect, it's part strategy game and part group improv exercise. And, as such, when you have talented actors playing like the folks at Critical Role, you can get a really entertaining narrative to watch through - and one where the outcomes aren't predetermined, but instead rely on the roll of the dice.

Critical Role is currently in the early stages (eleven episodes in, if memory serves) of their third campaign - a new narrative with new characters, but set within the same fictional world of Exandria, dreamed up by Dungeon Master Matt Mercer. The Legend of Vox Machina is built out of the events of the first campaign.

As someone who has watched (or rather listened to it in podcast form) the first campaign, the characters in the Legend of Vox Machina are very familiar to me. In a way, this is a bit like watching an adaptation of a book I've read - though instead of a bunch of prose, it's been hundreds of hours of D&D gameplay. I'm fairly invested here, so I'm simultaneously disposed to like this in large part for the joy of seeing these characters on screen, but also I think more primed to be hesitant in my praise because... well, I guess I'm an anxious person?

Campaign one actually started a bit in media res - the game had begun as a home game among friends, even using a different game system (Pathfinder, which is similar to D&D). As such, the first two episodes of the animated series actually adapt events that happened before the game was being streamed for the public. With the third episode, though, the series skips forward through some of the early content of the campaign to get to the "Briarwood Arc," which is generally considered the point at which Critical Role got really good.

I'd heard the series described as having a tone and style like "an R-Rated Avatar: the Last Airbender," and that seems fairly accurate so far - the show has some graphic violence, adult language, and even a little nudity. But it also has moments of absurd levity that feel of a piece with the on-set banter of the players during the campaign.

With seven central protagonists, the show has a lot of work to give each of them a reasonable characterization, and here as someone deeply familiar with these characters, I'm curious as to how a newcomer to the story would feel they succeed at this.

Another thing that's interesting is seeing how to adapt a game of Dungeons & Dragons without getting bogged down in the intricacies of the rules. The only direct reference to an actual game mechanic is the half-giant Grog shouting what was technically his player's invocation of a rule, but what became his catch-phrase: "I would like to rage!" (In D&D, the Barbarian class is built around going into a state known as a Rage, which increases the damage they do while decreasing the damage they take, but Travis Willingham would generally declare this in-character while they were playing.) A seasoned character will recognize the players casting familiar spells, but my sense is that they've worked hard to communicate the idea of the spells and abilities the characters use without getting lost in the weeds and alienating anyone.

The animation here is top-quality, with a lot of subtle "acting" from the characters and gorgeous backdrop vistas. I would definitely caution parents considering showing this to their kids, though, as the violence can get pretty hard-R.

In addition to just being a memorable and good part of the campaign, the Briarwood Arc that begins with episode 3 (and pretty faithfully adapts what happened in-game, I'll note) also has the benefit of focusing on one of its central characters - the prim and proper gunfighter, Percy, lost his home when he was a child to a couple of evil usurpers, and when they show up in his life again, he sees an opportunity for revenge, but also has to deal with some of the dark deals he's made to get that revenge.

Anyway, so far, I think the show is living up to the high expectations that Critical Role fans had.

Eternals

 With its arrival on Disney Plus, I've now seen Eternals, the... well, I guess not most recent MCU movie given that Spider-Man No Way Home came out in theaters, but in this Omicron time I'm avoiding crowded spaces for the time being, so, I'll have to wait (not even sure what platform it'll be on, as the Spider-Man movies have not, I believe, been on D+)

Eternals feels different than the other MCU films. We have gotten some of the brightly-colored "cosmic" stuff with Guardians of the Galaxy and Thor Ragnarok, but the story here is broad and epic in a different way, confined almost entirely to Earth.

And it's that broadness that I think hamstrings the movie.

One of the reasons why the first Avengers movie worked so well was that the major players had all had their own introductions. Four had had their own movies (yes, Edward Norton's Hulk is canonically the same as Mark Ruffalo's, and we've seen elements of the Incredible Hulk kind of drip back into the MCU canon) and the two remaining ones, Hawkeye and Black Widow, each showed up as supporting characters in one of those movies.

Super-teams can be tough, though. Again, I think Guardians of the Galaxy wound up working in part because it was less of a classic superhero narrative.

The Eternals has a lot of very big ideas to present to the audience. And it has a lot of "central" characters - the eponymous Eternals, of which there are ten. We've then also got to introduce the concept of the Celestials (which seems a little different than how the concept was introduced to us via Ego in GotG2). We also have the concept of the Deviants, which are so dull as monsters that even watching the trailer it was clear that they were a misdirection - though it turns out that they remain an unrelated, secondary threat up to the climax of the movie basically so that there's enough people for everyone to fight.

Oh, and Kit Harrington's character, Dane, would seem in the beginning to be a minor character except that it's Kit Harrington, so you know he's not going to be - this is just one of the more flagrant "we're just introducing this character now so he can be in stuff later" things that I think the MCU is usually a little better about.

Lest I be all critique, though, I will say that one of the movie's real strength's is that it looks totally different from other MCU films. Chloe Zhao fills the movie with gorgeous landscapes to serve as the characters' backdrops, with beautiful natural light. The movie has a sort of Terrence Malick look to it at points, which even extends to many of its action sequences. Even if the Deviants our heroes are fighting are super-generic, there's a fluidity to the cinematography and a willingness to use longer takes that make the action feel scrappier, despite these being some of the more powerful characters we've encountered.

Conceptually, the Eternals arrived on Earth 7000 years ago, and have been around as civilization has developed, protecting humanity all this time, and becoming part of the myths and legends of history. Some of these figures are more obvious than others ("Thena" oddly enough had a lot of fans in Athens,) but it's a cool concept that also contributes to the utterly absurd degree to which the MCU's cosmology is getting complicated.

I don't think the twists and turns of the story are hard to spot coming, but that's sort of ok - I think a twist's success is not measured by how hard it is to see coming, but on how well it shifts the narrative. There is a moral question at the heart of the antagonists' actions that allows for a bit of debate here, which actually, in an odd way, kind of makes this a cosmic horror story.

The movie tries to juggle a lot of characters, and I think that the most common problem that can cause winds up being a big thing here: protagonist syndrome. Sersi, played by Gemma Chan, is the character we focus on in the movie, seeing things from her primary perspective, but unfortunately, this leaves her little time to really get much of a personality. Indeed, I think only a couple of the characters really get a chance to break out. Brian Tyree Henry is great as Phastos (the sort of craftsman of the group, and the basis for Hephaestus,) who has the most stake in the world as a married man with a kid (also, the most "just try to edit this out of the movie for China and Russia" gay character in the MCU - the plot involving his husband and their kid is a pretty significant part of the movie, and we have what I think is the MCU's first same-sex kiss). Kumail Nanjiani also a lot of fun as Kingo, who has used his immortality to become a dynasty of Bollywood stars, and who brings his trusted valet around to shoot a documentary about the Eternals as they go on their quest.

Anyway, the movie ends with a promise for more, and I'm sure with the MCU's longterm planning we'll see these characters again, but I think any future Eternals-centric move is going to need to find a little more focus.

Hardness of Sci FI and The Expanse

 Currently in its final season, with only one episode left to release (I'm two episodes behind, though,) The Expanse is my favorite sci-fi show currently on "the air," whatever that means in a sort of post-television broadcast world.

This was actually a show I stumbled on without any word of mouth or recommendation - I had not heard of the books. I just saw a promo for it at some point, decided to check it out, and it turned out to be really, really good.

One of the things that the show, and the books it's based on, is praised for, is the "hardness" of its science fiction.

There's a general sense that there's a spectrum of hardness and softness within the science fiction genre. But how do we really define this spectrum?

Generally, the idea behind "hard" sci fi is that it speculates on technologies and phenomena that would be in-keeping with our modern understanding of science. Of course, inherently, there's still a bit of a bend. Future technologies naturally have to bridge some gap in our modern understanding of the universe in order to function.

In that sense, I think that sci-fi gets harder the fewer conceits it requires.

As an example: Star Trek is not terribly hard sci-fi. There are several things here that require fairly big leaps from our modern notions of the universe. In Star Trek, for instance, there's faster-than-light travel. Now, the Warp Drive does function using some speculative, theoretical ideas that could potentially be achieved thanks to some breakthrough in technology, but it would require some really huge advances. The Warp Drive acts by bending space in front and behind the starship, getting around the universal speed limit not by really going faster than light, but compressing space itself toward the front of the ship and expanding it out behind it, making it so that the distance the ship actually needs to cross is far, far smaller than the interstellar distances it would need to cross without this space-warping ability.

Now, actually achieving this on a practical level is something we're not sure we can do, and also we're not sure we could do it without destroying the spacecraft. We're not sure we could do it and have a way to stop. We're not sure that we'd be able to do it without a mind-bogglingly huge amount of energy.

There are other aspects of Star Trek that are addressed less directly, but arguably are even bigger head-scratchers. For example, when all the systems are failing on a starship, why is it that the artificial gravity (another technology we don't really know how we'd even start to build) never seems to fail? And, perhaps the biggest issue of all: how is that so many people across the galaxy look more or less like humans?

Admittedly, there's an episode of Next Generation that addresses the latter, introducing some progenitor species that seeded many worlds with the organic components that would eventually develop humanoid life. But that, in itself, flies in the face of theories about natural selection and the trial-and-error nature of evolution.

What I find interesting in the discourse of about the Expanse is that, for all of its "realistic" portrayal of life in space, there is plenty of unexplained phenomena.

The conceit, though, is that the unexplained stuff is alien.

The Expanse has some elements of cosmic horror - alien creatures (at least for the first five seasons) are truly alien - we don't even really seem to encounter any of the aliens themselves, but their technology functions in a totally unfamiliar way. Much of the plot revolves around a substance known as the "protomolecule," which seems to be some kind of artificially intelligent nanotechnology that repurposes material it finds (including organic matter, like, you know, people) to construct things it was designed to build.

And this stuff can do crazy things: we see it infecting people like a disease, and then taking over an asteroid while seemingly merging the minds of the people it has infected and killed, which then allows it to propel said asteroid in seemingly physics-defying ways, including a kind of reaction-less drive. That material then, eventually creates a circular gateway that leads to some kind of interdimensional space that then opens up gates to many other Earth-like worlds.

So, you know, not what you think of when you think of hard sci fi.

But that being said, where the hardness comes in is the depiction of human technology. Perhaps the primary conceit in the series is that nuclear reactor engines for space ships have become far more efficient, which allows ships to accelerate at a constant rate when crossing the solar system. Basically, a ship shoots toward its destination, accelerating at about 1g until it gets halfway there, then flips around with maneuvering thrusters and uses its engine to decelerate as they approach. As a result, artificial gravity is just generated through thrust and acceleration.

And when ships have to accelerate at higher speeds, the show depicts this as being a grueling and dangerous thing to do - space combat, which requires high speeds and tight maneuvering, often pushes the crews of the ships to the limit, and even if you avoid the bullets and torpedos fired at your ship, you might die from the internal stress of such intense g-forces.

Ironically, one of the most praised scenes in terms of realism both involves that alien, unexplained technology and also has a logical flaw in it that I don't seem to see addressed.

The aforementioned gateway created by the protomolecule leads into an interdimensional space that humanity is hesitant to explore. However, one thrill- and fame-seeking Belter (Belters being denizens of the Asteroid Belt and outer planets) decides to cruise into it and become the first person inside. However, in a moment of extremely graphic gore, the moment his ship enters the ring gate, it slows down nearly to a stop. But the pilot does not, and so his body is torn apart, splattered across the cabin of his ship. The ring gate and the interdimensional space within it has an unexplained way of placing a maximum speed on anything within it, so when his ship enters it, compared to its high previous speeds, it practically stops dead in its tracks, hence the splat.

I've seen a lot of people praise this scene for showing just how dangerous sudden deceleration can be. But I think there's a flaw: the Belter's ship appears to be entirely intact, about half of it sticking into the ring gate. The thing is, if the ring gate slows down the ship very suddenly, shouldn't the ship react as if it has just crashed into the surface of a planet? In other words, the moment the nose of the ship hits the slow-zone, it should crumble into the rest of the ship, and the whole thing should be a pancake, pilot included.

Instead, it looks like the ship is caught gently. And indeed, all the stuff in the interior of the ship other than the pilot seems to slow down along with the exterior of the ship, without any damage.

And that would sort of make sense, because if every atom on the ship is slowed down at the exact same time, even very suddenly, they're all still the same distance from each other and arranged the same way.

So, unless the slow-zone specifically chose not to slow down the biological organism within the ship, in theory he should have slowed down at the exact same rate, and thus should have been fine.

Consider this: when you're in the international space station, you're still experiencing gravity at about 90% of its normal effect. But because you and the space station are all basically falling (just also moving laterally at the same rate you're falling so you stay the same distance from the surface of the earth,) you can't really feel that gravity weighing down on you. We only feel weight because the surface of the earth is preventing us from free-falling.

I believe that if some highly massive object were to suddenly appear a few thousand miles from you when you were out in space, the gravitational pull would affect every part of you and your spacecraft equally, so unless you looked out a window or otherwise had the object's presence demonstrated to you, you wouldn't even notice - even if you and your ship were now falling toward the surface of that object.

So, again, unless the slow-zone only affect inorganic materials or something, the pilot should have been stopped suddenly and been basically fine.

And again, to specify - it wouldn't be like he was stopped by coming up against some hard surface. Every molecule that made him up should be slowed down at the same rate, and thus they should have remained arranged in the same way.

So yes, even hard sci fi can get nitpicked!

EDIT: Rewatching the 3rd season, well, I guess they do specify that the slow-zone only affects the exterior or the structure of the ship, and not its contents. It's more like a big catcher's mitt rather than a uniform force. So never mind.

The Lord of the Rings - Marathon

 Today, I got up relatively early to coordinate with my sister in New York to begin a marathon of Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy.

20 years on, this is the first time I've watched all three Extended Edition cuts of the movie back to back in a single day. The total is almost precisely 12 hours long.

When the first of these movies came out, I was 15, on winter break from my sophomore year of high school. In the summer before my freshman year, I read The Hobbit, and enjoyed it. The paperback edition I had was one that was part of a set with the Lord of the Rings, which used concept-art from the upcoming movies as their cover art. So, I first read this most quintessential of fantasy sagas with the vague knowledge that a movie trilogy was soon to be coming out.

As hype grew for the movies, I remember getting more and more excited. I had been a Star Wars fanatic since I was around eight or so, and I remember scoffing when John Rhys-Davies (Gimli) said at some red carpet event that he thought the movies were going to be bigger than Star Wars.

I was pleasantly surprised when they actually lived up to the hype.

The movies were a phenomenon - you got a feeling in the theater that you were witnessing film history, something that would go down as one of the grandest and most spectacular expressions of what the medium can do. I don't think I'd feel that way again until probably The Avengers (and even moreso, Avengers Endgame).

While I think the MCU will one day be looked back on (assuming at some point in our lifetimes it exists in the past tense, which is... possible, I guess) as a legendary achievement in the blockbuster film medium, I think Lord of the Rings manages to remain nearly universally beloved.

Unfortunately, like Star Wars, Lord of the Rings was also somewhat sullied by the inferior Hobbit prequel trilogy (caveat: I only saw the first one, so this is mostly based on critical responses). But by that point, franchise filmmaking was a bit more the norm, and I think that The Hobbit isn't as reviled as the Star Wars prequels (ignoring Gen Z folks and even some of my fellow millennials who have tried to get the prequels a critical rehabilitation) in part because the landscape of film changed after Lord of the Rings.

Jackson and his team were worried about getting greenlit for just two movies, trying to squeeze it all into two screenplays, but New Line offered them three pictures, to line up with the events of the books (more or less).

Anyway, these were foundational to me as a teenager. I think any fan of the fantasy genre is going to have strong opinions about Lord of the Rings, and the film adaptation managed to capture the essence of the books while dazzling us with amazing production design and visual effects.

So, let's talk observations from this day's lengthy re-watch.

First, regarding those effects: while they still look decent, I do think that the two decades since these movies came out (technically two decades since the first,) we've seen their influence enough that some of the elements aren't quite as mindblowingly impressive anymore. There are green-screen shots on CGI backdrops that don't quite get the color and lighting right - I think the first shot of the battle in the prologue is a good example of this. Gollum, which basically took the technical achievements of Jar Jar Binks and gave them to an actually well-written character, is and was stunning, though I think my eye is too well-trained to really be fooled into thinking he's physically in the world with Frodo and Sam.

One of the things I love is how much of Peter Jackson's weirdo indie instincts were allowed to let their freak flag fly here. There are a lot of sequences that are dream-like and expressionistic. Lots of images we see seem to not so much literally depict things as they are happening in the reality of the story, but more get across the feeling of what the characters are going through. Maybe the most visually bizarre is the sequence in which Frodo loses consciousness after Arwen saves him from the Nazgul, and then we get this weird fever dream of white where Hugo Weaving's disembodied head says stuff in Elvish to him.

Also, Jackson likes low-framerate slow-mo (which I guess is just post-camera slow-mo) and, I'll be honest, I think it often looks kind of cheesy. Not that it doesn't work.

Tolkien was, of course, not exactly up to the modern liberal standards on race relations, and the depiction of, basically, all the "evil" humans (except the hill people Saruman recruits) being of non-white ethnicities does, you know, kind of stick in one's craw a bit. Let's just say that the racial optics of the movies leave something to be desired.

I was also thinking a bit about how the way that the movies are written more or less dispenses with naturalistic dialogue. And I kind of love that about it - I think that sometimes we can get it into our heads that naturalism is inherently better than the kind of speechifying you find in Lord of the Rings, but there is something fun about the poetic nature of the language (lifting, of course, a lot of it from the books themselves). This is part of what makes Ian McKellen so profoundly awesome as Gandalf - his Shakespearean gravitas is exactly what a character like that calls for.

The production design is also mind-blowing still. Even if some of the visual effects show their age (though not, like, a lot) pretty much every set and costume and prop looks basically perfect.

Howard Shore's gift for leitmotif gives us a score that rivals John Williams' best work, though I'll concede that there are some moments when a leitmotif's theme becomes slightly confused - I think we get one point in which the Rohirrim are charging to the same music we got for the March of the Ents. I wonder if that might be a product of the Extended Editions' re-edits, though. Still, despite those very nitpicky moments, the score is filled with memorable themes that do wonders for the tone of the films.

Uh, let's see: the Balrog is awesome, and the sequences where Gandalf fights it in Two Towers are even more awesome. The army of the dead is super cool (man, how many fantasy epics have the giant undead army fight for the good guys?) The Ringwraiths are awesome. Eowyn spends a little too much time desperately needing someone to tell her that he's just not that into her, but then she gets to have the most badass kill in the trilogy (with an assist from Merry).

I also find myself wishing we could see what Minas Morgul is like (though I guess we don't really see much of Barad-Dur either).

Geographically, I don't know why so much of Gondor's power and population are right on the very borderlands with Mordor (though I guess maybe the kingdom was founded to keep an eye on what was previously a fairly disorganized and inert Mordor? I can't remember if Elendil was king of Gondor or of some proto-Gondor post-Numenorean civilization. I'll look it up).

Anyway, I freaking love these movies, and it's nice to know that twenty years on, they hold up. Truth be told, I think that modern fantasy adaptations might be taking too much Game of Thrones and not enough Lord of the Rings - GoT was a deconstruction, but I think some of its aesthetics the narrative styles have been adopted by people who might be better served by trying Lord of the Rings' more lyrical approach.

Incidentally, in the day I've had this "blogger" page open to write this post, I just re-watched Stardust. The movie came out four years after Lord of the Rings, and is sort of an odd throwback in a lot of ways - it's more Princess Bride in its style, very much a modern-day fairy tale. My recollection was that it got an ambivalent reception on release, but it's stuck with those who like that sort of movie. It's also funny to see future Daredevil have Superman/Geralt of Rivia as a romantic rival (being pre-Man of Steel, this is decidedly before Henry Cavil hit his current movie star status). Anyway, it's a charming movie, though I think I remember liking Robert DeNiro's performance more when I saw it in theaters. He's cast against type here, but I don't know that he really grows into that role. That said, I really wish we could normalize American accents in fantasy films, but that's just my soapbox of "not all fantasy needs to be Medieval Europe."

Anyway, watching all three Extended Editions in a row feels like a thing to check off my list, though I'm not sure it's the ideal way to experience them. The movies came out a year apart from one another, and I think they work quite well when you take a break to digest each one. Still, the story is told well enough that even eleven hours in, I found myself still paying attention, which is no small feat.