Went to watch Lord of the Rings, The Return of the King last night - our first time to go to a cinema since last summer when Megumi was pregnant. I'm not going to attempt a film review here (many people can do that much better than I can). Instead, I will just list a couple of points that interested me:
-effects etc were great.
I, like most people I know, was impressed by the pure scale of the thing.
-the downside of this is that some of the effects could really have been taken from another film. There was just something about the CG that made some of the scenes a little anonymous - the flying Ring-Wraiths could have come from Jurassic Park, the 'elephant' scenes reminded me of Star Wars AT-AT fighters, and a couple of the set-piece battle scenes could have come from Braveheart.
-to be really pedantic, there is NO WAY that Gandalf with his huge white staff and Aragorn with that big sword would have found room to swing the bloody things around the way they did. The armies were stacked about a hundred men/orcs deep, they charged straight at them, and then managed to find room to swing 8-foot long poles around! Come on, Mr Jackson, that's not very realistic is it...? (and by the way, in hand-to-hand fighting, those in the front always died)
-One group of humans in the film comes from Gondor, and another from Rohan. If they decided to create one empire, they could call it 'The Empire of Gohan', or Rice Empire (sorry, it just struck me as I was watching the movie...)
-Finally, congrats to one of the characters who manages to hook up with a pretty girl called Rosie.
Posted by Gary at March 15, 2004 09:36 AM