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.