Judging A Movie By Its Trailer

Just to spice things up a bit, I thought I might try something a little adventurous. There have been a few trailers for highly anticipated films recently, and I thought I might try reviewing each movie based on its trailer. Later on down the line, I’ll actually watch the movies and review them proper and we can all look back at this little article and see how accurate I was. I should add a little disclaimer that these are just some of the most popular trailers to have hit the net. They are not particularly movies that I’m jonesing to see (a few of them are). Well, here goes nothin’:

The Hobbit directed by Peter Jackson.

The Lord of the Rings is the epic trilogy of my adolescence. I saw the first one in the middle of high-school and the last one the year before I graduated. When I first heard that The Hobbit was going to be directed by Guillermo Del Toro, I was a little sceptical. Not because I think Del Toro is a bad director, I just didn’t think he was right for it. Then I heard that Peter Jackson was actually directing and saw a few of the onset video diaries for the movie, and worried that they were going to make it a CGI-fest like virtually every other blockbuster out there. Plus I read that they were shoe-horning in a whole bunch of characters that weren’t in the original book. I realise that I must appear a little pretentious, especially considering I’ve only read The Hobbit twice in my lifetime, but I’m old-school, and I don’t like film-makers fuckin’ with the source material.

It was the trailer that turned it around. It opens with an establishing shot of Bag-End, complete with Frodo and Bilbo Baggins, and the whole thing just feels like The Lord of the Rings. The original set is back, the original actors too. Gandalf is there, and so is Frodo (in some capacity). You almost get the sense that the whole thing is a reunion of sorts, despite the fact that it’s a prequel. Gandalf asking Bilbo if he would like to come on an adventure is the stuff that goosebumps were made for.

Despite it all being very emotionally stirring; there is one aspect of the trailer that I struggle with. That is, the song that is sung by the dwarf leader Thorin Oakenshield. It is very sombre in tone, as if Bilbo, Gandalf and co. are all going to march to their deaths for the sake of saving Middle-Earth. Whilst this tone was great for Lord of the Rings, which literally depicted the war to save mankind, the same tone is not really appropriate for The Hobbit, which is above all else about hunting for treasure. I hope that Jackson remembers this at the end of the day and keeps things suitably light-hearted.

Verdict based on trailer: Four stars.

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The Dark Knight Rises directed by Christopher Nolan.

Let me just put this out there right away: I think that The Dark Knight is vastly overrated, as is its auteur, Christopher Nolan. I’ve not seen a Christopher Nolan film that I’ve actually liked. Nolan is like that kid in English that was always so keen to contribute to discussion, but only ever came up with rudimentary and even dangerous interpretations of texts. He tries so hard, and his movies seem intellectual to those that aren’t very intelligent. Those last two sentences seemed especially harsh, but I’m sure Nolan isn’t going to lose any sleep about what some douche-bag with a blog that no one reads says about him. Also, someone needs to put a stop to all this Nolan romanticising: His views of criminality and the human condition, as expressed in Batman Begins and The Dark Knight, are simplistic at best, and his whole political philosophy reeks of sympathy towards capitalism and American exceptionalism.

Things I liked in the trailer? The whole football stadium collapsing behind the guy with the football is visually impressive, to be sure, but the most interesting thing going on is Anne Hathaway’s dialogue as Cat-woman. She says something along the lines of “You think this can last? There’s a storm coming Mr. Wayne. When it hits you’re gonna wonder how you could live so large and leave so little for the rest of us.” If the Joker represented a misinformed view of anarchy, then Catwoman is surely some kind of renegade socialist, who is out to teach the fat cats a lesson in wealth redistribution. It’s interesting that Nolan explores issues of class, what is less interesting is that Cat-woman will undoubtedly be depicted as mentally unstable and end up dying in the film, to signify that whilst capitalism and the American brand of globalisation has its flaws, it’s the best system to blah blah blah...

At least it looks like Batman will die in the end of this film as well, which will finally put an end to Nolan’s stint Gotham City.

Verdict based on trailer: Two stars.

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Prometheus directed by Ridley Scott.

This is probably the trailer that I’m most interested in. I’m a huge Alien nerd, and have always wondered what it would be like if either Ridley Scott or James Cameron returned to the well that helped to establish them as big names. Although Scott has said that Prometheus is not directly a prequel to Alien, a viewing of the trailer reveals that it is indeed set in the same universe and answers the most pertinent question that arose from Alien: What is the space-jockey?

Although we can’t really tell much from the trailer, which consists of a bunch of images that flash right after the other, I’m thinking (or maybe just hoping) that this movie will be a return to form for Ridley Scott. The tagline for the movie hints at an answer as to why life exists on Earth, and given Scott’s track record for deep metaphysical pondering (Why don’t I help the tortoise?), we could be in for a real treat.

Or we might not be. One thing that bugged me about the trailer is the reliance of the Inception horn-like sound effects. BAAAAHHHH!!!! BAAAHHHH!!! This could be another flash in the pan like pretty much every Ridley Scott film released after Gladiator.

But here’s to hoping.

Verdict based on trailer: Five Stars.

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The Avengers directed by Joss Whedon.

Verdict based on trailer: One Star.

'Jackass 3D' directed by Jeff Tremaine.

Produced by: Johnny Knoxville, Jeff Tremaine and Spike Jonze.

Written by: Jackass cast.

Year of release: 2010.

Run time: 94 minutes.

Studio: MTV Films.

Budget: $20 Million.

Gross Revenue: $170, 256, 125.

The last three movies that I’ve reviewed on this site have been—what I like to call at least—main-course movies. That is, they provide (or at least attempt to provide) nourishment for the wandering soul. However, as regular readers will probably know, it is a recurring trend on this site for your humble reviewer to see a whole bunch of main-course movies in a row. This leaves me feeling bloated and sometimes depressed. In this mindset, I feel it is appropriate to enjoy a few dessert or snack movies. When it comes to good snacks, you really can’t go past Jackass.

I’m sure that there are a lot of film critics out there that look down their noses at Jackass—believing it to be nothing but low brow entertainment. Its association with MTV (a corporate experiment into ‘cool’ that I think is largely obnoxious) is unfortunate, but there is a lot more going on in Jackass than I think these critics realise. Although Jackass 3D, like the films that came before it, remains plotless, there is a lot more to the franchise than many give it credit for. Indeed, I’m sure that there is a postgraduate essay to be written on the philosophy of being a jackass.

If an idea is a fossil, as Stephen King says it is, then I think the point of this review is to perhaps unearth an idea I’ve had about Jackass, pretty much since I started watching it back in my senior year of high-school. The jackasses, as I shall refer to the cast as a collective, represent perhaps the most favourable strain of nihilism that I’m willing to accept. If nihilism, is the negation of meaning from life itself, Jackass represent a playful acceptance of the doctrine. The moment Nietzsche proclaimed the death of God, a lot of us were set free from the authoritarian and abusive relationship we had with him. We were also simultaneously forced to ask ‘In the absence of meaning, why should we continue to live?’

The answer according the Johnny Knoxville and co. seems to be to have as much fun as you can by risking your life in hilarious, cartoonish ways. And if you’re not doing that, you might as well laugh at someone that is. Now, I’m not sure if any of the jackasses are religious, and it’s likely that some of them probably are. If they are, they probably might read this and say that I’m over intellectualising Jackass, and that might be true. However, I think that the franchise has garnered such social popularity, amongst all kinds of people (even my mum enjoyed the first movie), purely because it taps into subconscious realisation that there is no inherent meaning to life.

Jackass strips away a lot of the pretension that comes with thinking about nihilism. Whilst the various existential philosophers (Sartre, Camus etc), who are confined to the reading lists of university courses, search for establishing meaning in a meaningless world, the Jackasses say “Fuck it, let’s launch Steve-O one-hundred feet into the air in a porter-potty.” The fact that they have been allowed to do so, well into their thirties, speaks to how funny society finds them, and how an open-market system rewards popularity above any other moral agenda.

In addition to its somewhat sophisticated philosophical commentary, or even to exemplify it, the Jackass franchise also has character development if you look hard enough for it. The best example of this that is evident in Jackass 3D is certainly Steve-O, the loveable clown who is notorious for his alcohol/drug habits and mental health problems. This time, Steve-O is sober, and you can really tell. He approaches stunts with a renewed sense of anxiety. During one stunt that involves him taking a baseball to the nuts, he actually gets so anxious that he walks away from it temporarily. He does return to complete the stunt, but says “Why do I have to be Steve-O?” into the camera. It’s a pretty existential question, but it’s not one that Steve-O dwells on with any seriousness. He asks it, and then takes a baseball to the nuts like a champ. You really get a sense that for this crew of jackasses, that the meaning they’ve carved for themselves is to find the humour in the agony of existence.

A reviewer, I forget who, commented that watching the anxiety of jackasses as they being attempting the stunts, is funnier than the stunts themselves. I don’t know if that’s true; anxiety without a pay-off just isn’t satisfying—the two come together like a burger and a bun—but there is something to be said for watching the ageing jackasses get more anxious with old age. When Steve-O refuses to run through a gauntlet of cattle-prods and electric tasers by saying “I think I’m going to have a fucking panic-attack...”, it’s funny because Steve-O is no longer invincible. However, like Sisyphus, he still manages to run the gauntlet not because the world is particularly beautiful, but because it’s just fucking funny.

Four stars:

'We Need To Talk About Kevin' directed by Lynne Ramsay.

Produced by: Jennifer Fox, Luc Roeg, and Bob Salerno.

Written by: Lynne Ramsay and Rory Stewart Kinnear. (Based on a novel by Lionel Shriver).

Starring: Tilda Swinton, John C. Reilly, and Ezra Miller.

Year of release: 2011.

Country: United Kingdom and United States.

Budget: $7 Million.

Box Office: $4, 339, 547.

This was a difficult one to watch. It’s billed as a psychological thriller, but you should read that as ‘arty-movie-that-doesn’t-quite-fit-into-a-genre-so-we’ll-just-tack-on-Psychological-Thriller’. Won’t go into too much detail about the plot, you can find that on the Wikipedia entry here. To summarise it in a sentence? How about: Mother deals with life after her sociopathic son performs a massacre via bow-and-arrow at his high-school. There is another movie coming out featuring Maria Bello and Martin Sheen that deals with the same theme, but judging by that film’s trailer, it couldn’t be more different from this.

Though it’s not particularly violent (at least not until then end), it’s still a film that is unbearable to watch. This is perhaps reinforced by the recurring and uncomfortable motif of thick red liquid plaguing Tilda Swinton’s Eva Katchadourian in virtually every scene that she is in. From the beginning, Eva is covered in it in the form of crushed tomatoes when she takes place in La Tomatina, the famous festival that occurs in Spain. This first scene is a flashback that establishes Eva as a travel-hungry, adventurous, and childless woman in absolute bliss. The film quickly jumps to Eva as she is several months after the massacre that her teenage son committed. She wakes up on her couch in a faded Led Zeppellin t-shirt and hurries to go to work only to notice that her house has been vandalised by red paint, most likely by a parent of a student that Eva’s son killed. Whoever the vandals are, they manage to tag a good portion of the front of her house and the windshield of her car. Eva then has to use newspaper to remove the thick red paint from her windshield so that she can drive to work. The sight of Tilda Swinton removing viscous red substance from her property and herself is something that you’ll soon get used to. Whilst some might say that it is an obvious symbol, it’s effective nonetheless. Her constant cleaning gives us the sense that she’ll never be able mop up all the blood that her son has spilled, on a social and emotional level.

It must be said that Tilda Swinton is marvellous in this film. I’d heard a lot of buzz about her performance before I managed to see it, and it’s justified. Though a lot of this works purely because of the structure of her face. Swinton is really quite strange looking-- I mean this as the utmost compliment. I think if they were to cast someone with a more conventional appearance that the film might suffer as a result. Kevin is such an odd and hostile child, and for someone as conventionally beautiful as say...Rachel Weisz to give birth to such a sociopath would cheapen the whole event. It sounds like I’m saying that the film works because only ugly people give birth to sociopaths, but that’s not what I mean at all. Swinton is really quite striking; just in a way that is not in line with traditional Hollywood beauty. I simply think that by putting an unconventionally looking actress in the lead, Ramsay manages to highlight that each individual is utterly genetically unique, and that this could be why some babies are born sociopathic. Swinton is also a brilliant actress who takes us through such a strange range of emotions. She’ll get an Oscar nom for this, though I don’t know whether the Academy will give her another statue. Needless to say Swinton is a fucking powerhouse.

As for the central theme of the film; well it’s a complicated one that comments on the age old psychological conundrum of Nature vs. Nurture. The film presents us with the question: ‘Why is Kevin the way that he is?’ and the two answers that it seemingly hints at is that he was either born that way, or that he was made that way due to Eva’s own lack of empathy. This is one of those films that is left intentionally ambiguous. There is evidence to suggest both possibilities. When Kevin constantly mucks up as a toddler, a fed-up Eva tells him: “Mommy was happy until Kevin came along, now she wakes up every day and wishes she was in France.” Even though Kevin is only very young when she says it, it’s sort of implied that he could certainly pick up on her tone.

This film is one that will certainly inspire a lot of heated debate amongst film-goers, and I might even be tempted to write a more detailed argument about what I think the film says about the ‘Nature vs. Nurture’ issue. However, this review is already spiralling well past the five-hundred word limit. It is enough to say that it is a really riveting, though gut-wrenching film. It’s the kind that I probably won’t watch again, at least not for a while.

Four stars:

'Tree of Life' directed by Terrence Malick.

Produced by: Dede Gardner, Sarah Green, Grant Hill, Brad Pitt, and Bill Pohlad.

Written by: Terrence Malick.

Starring: Brad Pitt, Sean Penn, and Jessica Chastain.

Year of release: 2011.

Run Time: 139 minutes.

Budget: $32 Million.

Gross Revenue: $54, 246, 069. 

“The nuns taught us that there are two ways through life- the way of nature and the way of grace. You have to choose which one you’ll follow. Grace doesn’t try to please itself, accepts being slighted, forgotten, disliked, accepts insults and injuries. Nature only wants to please itself. Get others to please it too. Likes to lord it over them. To have its own way. It finds reasons to be unhappy when all the world shines around it, and love is smiling through all things.” Jessica Chastain’s Mrs. O’Brien informs us in voice over at the beginning of Tree of Life, and we the audience know that it is in for something special.

This movie was my second experience of Terrence Malick’s exceptional writing/direction, the first being The Thin Red Line, which is often unfairly compared unfavourably with Saving Private Ryan due to the proximity of its release to Spielberg’s war epic. I’m happy to report that Tree of Life is a stunning film—one of those classic films that inspired me to start writing a blog about film in the first place. Not only is it visually intriguing, and riveting dramatically, it also connects two ideas that have too long stood unrelated in the general zeitgeist: the relationship between the evolution of species and human behaviour.

If I were to recommend a companion book for this movie, it would certainly be Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene. This book is a consciousness shifter, the kind that changes your entire view on life after you read it. If you have ever found yourself pondering why humans behave the way they do, then let me assure you that The Selfish Gene provies an answer, and indeed the answer to that timeless question of the meaning of life. And if The Selfish Gene provides the answer, then Malick’s Tree of Life certainly extends the reach of the book well into human psychology, attempting to explain human nature through a scientific lens. Is it successful? Probably not as much as it could have been if the run-time was extended by another two hours, but Tree of Life still stands as one of the most thought provoking films of 2011 (it is perhaps bested by Lars Von Trier’s Melancholia, which I shall endeavour to review at some point).

When I say that Malick attempts to explain human psychology via a scientific lens, I suppose you’d be forgiven for thinking that the film is a cold consideration of humanity, much like Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion. It is a sad fact that most people quickly associate the word ‘scientific’ with words like ‘cold’, ‘sterile’, and ‘non-living’. When the grandiose and beautiful reality of biology on Earth is considered, science is quickly transformed into something that is warm and wonderful (though sometimes cruel indeed). Tree of Life is filled with such warmth, and such insight into what it is like to be a human, that you'd be a pretty hard individual to not be at least a little moved by it. It successfully manages to marry the depth of human emotion with the scientific crane of evolution by natural selection in a way that would make Richard Dawkins proud.

By now, you’re probably aware that the film doesn’t follow a linear narrative path, but rather presents fragments of narrative through stunning images. This is certainly true in the first half of the film, which leads up to the much lauded montage of the big bang, right on past the evolution of simple life forms, to the extinction of the dinosaurs. After this however, Malick explores the life of the O’Brien family much more comprehensively, though altogether natural and realistic. You get the sense that you are actually witnessing real lives, as opposed to characters, and scenes where the boys of the film put themselves in danger cause a primitive emotional response; you wish you could reach into the film and tell them to stop doing what they are doing.

The film is marred a little in the last twenty-minutes, where it kind of meanders off and doesn’t really make much sense (at least not to me), but ultimately Malick achieves something that no other film-maker has; a vision that is beautiful and utterly unique. Is this not more than we can ask for as an audience of cinema? Though Tree of Life might not change your outlook on life completely, its ideas will stay with you pleasantly for weeks. It's also one of those movies (much like 2001: A Space Odyssey) that's going to be interpreted and reinterpreted for years. I thoroughly recommend this one.


                                               Four-and-a-half stars:

'The Ledge' directed by Mathew Chapman.

‘The Ledge’ directed by Mathew Chapman.

Produced by: Michael Mailer, Mark Damon and Mathew Chapman.

Written by: Mathew Chapman.

Starring: Charlie Hunnam, Terrence Howard, Liv Tyler and Patrick Wilson.

Release date: January 21^st, 2011 (Sundance)

Budget: $10 Million.

When I first saw the trailer for this movie, I thought that it could be interesting. It’s essentially a thriller based around the conflict between religion and atheism, a debate which has grown in popularity since Richard Dawkins published The God Delusion and subsequently released a bee in the bonnet of pretty much anyone that takes the concept of faith seriously. I think there are a lot of people out there tapping away on keyboards that are all too ready to proudly take a position on the issue. All you need to do is sign up to an internet message board and hang around for a while before an atheism/religion argument pops up. I’m not saying that it’s not an important debate (it’s probably the most important), I guess what I’m trying to say is that there are too many people out there in cyberspace that are arguing the issue just for the sake of arguing (this is true of both sides). For the record I’m an atheist, and for one more record, I’m not a physicist or a biologist that has dedicated my life to the pursuit of answering the big questions. So for the remainder of this review, I’m gonna do what it is people who aren’t physicists or biologists should do when it comes to questions about reality: Shut the fuck up.

As an atheist, however, I was interested to see how the The Ledge would unfold. I went in expecting heated drama motivated by two opposing views of life. What I got was an unconvincing mess of a film that was, at the best, clichéd to the point that it was laughable, and at the worst, more pretentious than your average Mac owner.  It appears that Chapman (writer/director) has written the script with a copy of The God Delusion at his side, and simply shoe-horned each argument into his plot. Whilst this is not necessarily enough to make the film shit, Chapman solved that problem by injecting his movie full of the over-dramatic cheese that only Americans seem to be capable of.

An example of this? Well, The Ledge has its damsel-in-distress in the form of Liv Tyler’s character Shana, a devoutly religious woman who is married to the worst kind of alpha-male—the one that has received a higher calling from Yaweh himself. Why is Shana religious? Because she used to be a prostitute and one of her johns had a church fetish: he liked to have sex prostitutes inside churches and then beat them up. This is no joke folks, Liv Tyler tells us so in the second act. When she says it, the first thing I wondered was how the hell you have sex inside a church without anyone noticing. The second thing I wondered was just how obvious the whole backstory was. This is the kind of writing you’d expect from a tenth grade emo kid’s creative writing assessment. The kind the teacher probably laughed at, but ultimately gave an A+ because all the other kids wrote about what they did in the summer break.

Another problem I had was that none of the characters were likeable. Indeed if film is a dessert that we enjoy after the main course that is our daily life, then The Ledge is arse-hole pie. The atheist protagonist makes it his mission to seduce Shana just because he feels like he needs to liberate her from the puritanical leash of her husband, not because he likes her or anything, just to make a patronising point. Indeed women should be mad at Shana’s characterisation here. She’s basically a fuck-puppet that gets passed from one douche-bag to another douche-bag without so much as complaining about her role in the warped power play. Of course, it’s okay to have unlikeable characters in film. There Will Be Blood had a bastard of a protag, and it’s one of the greatest films ever made. The characters that inhabit The Ledge just aren’t developed well enough. A few of them achieve character arcs, but they are uninteresting and utterly contrived. I think it took two scenes of Terrence Howard’s whole rocky family situation before I just didn’t give a shit anymore.

And the ending sucked. I won’t give it away and spoil it for those out there that want to see it, but suffice to say Terrence Howard has what is quite possibly the most retarded Eureka! moment ever recorded on film.

One star:

'Gnomeo and Juliet' directed by Kelly Asbury.

Produced by: Baker Bloodworth, David Furnish, Steve Hamilton Shaw and Elton John.

Written by: John R. Smith, Rob Sprackling, Kelly Asbury, Mark Burton, Andy Riley, Kevin Cecil, Emily Cook, Kathy Greenberg, Steve Hamilton Shaw.

Starring: James McAvoy, Emily Blunt, Michael Kane, Jason Stratham, Maggie Smith, Patrick Stewart and a bunch of other Brits.

Music by: Elton John, Chris P. Bacon and James Newton Howard.

Year of release: 2011.

Budget: $36 Million.

Gross Revenue: $189, 712, 432.

My girlfriend chose this movie when we were in the video-store looking for something to watch. I have a sneaking suspicion that she chose it because she’s halfway through the fifth season of Six Feet Under and just needs a break from all the fucking sadness that seems to permeate every second of that show. Regardless, I didn’t complain too much because the idea of Romeo and Juliet as a computer animated kid’s film intrigued me. I wondered whether or not the titular gnomes would meet the fateful end that garnered the original play its tragedy tagline (the gnomes don’t kill themselves by the way, something which annoyed me a little bit before I realised that suicide is probably a little bit too hectic for kids aged 4-10 to have to confront.)

The music of Elton John worked pretty well for the most part, however I did think that they could have used more of his songs here. I think you get three or four of them, and it’s nice to see how the film-makers fit them into the story, but I was hanging out for Goodbye Yellow Brick Road or Love Lies Bleeding, and instead got the typically clichéd Your Song. Also, Elton John doesn’t actually sing many of the songs; they are covers by artists who by definition (i.e.- not being Elton John) are inferior.

Apart from that, the story is pretty good and the movie actually works as a kind of introduction to the themes of Romeo and Juliet for kids. The best part about the movie however is definitely the gnomes. They are all very cute and they get up to all kinds of gnome mischief, which is what you want to see in a movie like this. Particular favourites include the red gnomes which all run around and say funny things. Also the flamingo was pretty cool.

The movie isn’t all skittles and sunshine though, and if I had of been at the premiere sitting in close proximity to the film’s director, during the credits I would have huffed “Well it was no fucking Pixar Film, that’s for sure!” before I tossed the remainder of my popcorn to the floor and spat on the seat. No, come on, I wouldn’t do that. If I was actually invited to the premiere of a movie, I’d be well chuffed to meet everyone and generally just pleased to get out of the house.

The Good: The constant references to different Shakespeare plays in the same way that various elements of pop. culture are referenced in the Shrek movies. Sure, some of the Shakespeare references are a bit cheap (in the Gnomeo and Juliet universe there is a removalist company called Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Removals), but at least it’s sort of trying. Also Ashley Jenson’s turn as Nanette the frog is really refreshing because she actually tries to be something other than the character she was famous for in Extras. Something which can’t be said for Stephen Merchant, who plays the same character in every fucking thing he’s in.

The Bad: At the beginning of the movie, a gnome comes out and says something along the lines of: “Before we begin the movie, I must read out a long and boring prologue to establish the scene...” He then sets about reading the opening lines from Romeo and Juliet before being booed off stage. It sort of screamed ignorance to me and reminded me of one of those douche bags that everyone knows that says something like: “Shakespeare was ruined for me in school...” whenever the topic turns to Shakespeare, as if anyone gives a shit what you think, you narcissistic cunt.

The Ugly: The gnomes all breathe as though they are just regular humans. There are several scenes where some of them exert themselves and then have to catch their breath, and everything seems to work as though they have organic lungs. Yet whenever they eat, the food clunks as it goes down as if it were rubbing against porcelain. That shit sent a shiver down my spine.

Three stars:

'The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring [Extended Edition]' directed by Peter Jackson.

Produced by: Peter Jackson, Barrie M. Osborne, Tim Sanders and Fran Walsh.

Written by: Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens and Peter Jackson. (Based on the book by J.R.R Tolkien.)

Starring: Elijah Wood, Ian McKellen, Viggo Mortensen, Sean Astin, Liv Tyler, John Rhys-Davies, Orlando Bloom, Sean Bean, Billy Boyd, Dominic Monaghan, Cate Blanchett, Christopher Lee, Hugo Weaving and Ian Holm.

Music by: Howard Shore.

Distributed by: New Line Cinema.

Year of release: 2001.

Run time: 228 Minutes.

Budget: $93 Million.

Gross Revenue: $870, 761, 744.

So the blu-ray extended editions of The Lord of the Rings have been released and I managed to watch the first instalment with friends just the other day. I realise that everyone has seen these movies already, but I thought I would write about them because... Fuck you, that’s why.

The Lord of the Rings has always been dear to me. At high-school when the inevitable Lord of the Rings vs. Harry Potter debate came up it was always no contest. Harry Potter had a bunch of kids stumbling awkwardly through their adolescence and Lord of the Rings had fucking Aragon handing a delicious pot of smack down to a bunch of cloak wearing mother-fuckers, culminating with him throwing a burning torch at one and setting him on fire. You won’t find that at Hogwarts, I always used to say. Also the lines are just more memorable in LOTR. Anytime I walk through the automated sliding doors at shopping centres, I’m sure to whisper ‘Mellon’ so that no one around me will hear it. Don’t get me wrong, Harry Potter had its charms too, but I didn’t hear anyone cheering in the cinema during Goblet of Fire. In the cinema where I first viewed Fellowship however, the crowd erupted in spontaneous applause when Aragorn beheaded that huge orc that killed the troubled, yet ultimately good, Boromir.

Fellowship is defintiely my favourite of the trilogy, and I’m sure it has nothing to do with the quality of the other films. I suppose it’s because I saw Fellowship with both my parents when they were still together. It was during the following year that they separated and ultimately divorced. So I went into Fellowship still firmly in the familial nest, at the tender age of fifteen when the ideas of magic and wonder were still very accessible to me. The next year, after the nest was ripped apart, I viewed The Two Towers through a much more cynical lens. I still enjoyed it, but only amidst a cloud of anxiety and general stress. When I watched Fellowship  again, I was able to remember the good times that I had with my family, because seeing it at the cinema was one of the good times we had. I’m not sure whether that’s sad or not, but I think it speaks to the way in which pop. culture is so deeply enmeshed with our own emotional development. At least if you were one of the awkward kids at high-school.

The Good: The atmosphere of mystery and awe that is generated so well in this first chapter. A lot of the scenes are ‘talking’ scenes, and we definitely get the sense that some bad shit is gonna go down before it’s all over. The intensity is brought across in the dialogue which is laced with a subtext of apocalyptic anxiety. Even Elrond walks around like he is in need of a cigarette, and he’s the king of the most peaceful race in Middle-Earth! Also, the killer musical score that reaches an explosive climax during the mines of Moria—specifically the part where Aragorn and Frodo successfully jump from the massive broken piece of stair-case and the fellowship triumphantly run off as an alternate chorus of Howard Shore’s score blares.

The Bad: I’m also a big fan of the books, and I’m a bit pissed that I can’t read them now without imagining Elijah Wood as Frodo. I used to have this clear image of what I thought Frodo—and hobbits in general—looked liked, but that’s all shot to shit thanks to these movies which I’m sure executed the imaginations of thousands of Tolkien fans.

The Ugly: The king and queen Elves in Lothlorien talk too slowly. I remember being mesmerised by how cool they were when I first saw the movie. Now they just sound like they have a slight mental retardation.

I was tempted to give this a four star rating just because I didn’t want to look like too much of a geek, but 

fuck that shit right? It’s Lord of the Rings man.

Five Stars: