optimistickid

i got return of the king extended for christmas. i was looking forward to getting it, and now i watched it and i regret ever wanting it. i didn't enjoy it. there are many things that i didn't enjoy about it. i just didn't feel like it had a special quality to it. it didn't make me excited. i didn't fall in love with the characters. i didn't like a lot of the casting. i didn't feel swept away into another world. peter jackson is cgi obsessed, just like george lucas is, and although i think jackson did a better job than lucas did on the new star wars, i still felt like i was just watching another special effects hollywood blockbuster, and not a classic film. i couldn't help but notice time after time how the movie did things differently from the book. i know that the books are too long to make them exactly alike, but it annoys me when they changed things that could've been kept the same. it baffles me how they changed things which don't make the movie better. the most obvious choice is sauron. the book clearly states that sauron is not some big eyeball. i've read that this was not a deliberate change by jackson, but a misunderstanding. hello! how about a little research before you start the biggest movie of all time. what the fuck is a big eye supposed to do with a ring anyway? it would've been much cooler if they had shown the black hand with only 4 fingers, and given sauron a shape. they wouldn't reveal exactly how he looks, but they could show him in some dark place, with the eye peering out from under a hood or something. now that is much cooler than a big red looker, imo. secondly, elijah wood sucks as frodo. he has hardly any lines, and he just sucks in the few lines he does. he looks comatosed through the entire movie. not to mention the fact that he's supposed to be 50 years old and he looks like he just got his first pube. and i honestly don't like ian mckellen as gandalf. he looks like a cool gandalf, but his temperment is too... wimpy! he displays his kindness much too often. the gandalf i know from the book is much sterner, confident, and quick witted. mckellen looks afraid and doubtful far too often. and lastly, i don't like how they conceived gollum either. they just made him way too cute. and his voice was too annoying. i honestly liked the cartoon gollum from the rankin/bass movies much better. some more things i didn't like was shelob. in case you haven't figured it out i'm not a big fan of cgi. i think it can be good if used sparingly, but when when entire characters are cgi, i don't like it usually. the fight scene with shelob is such a big bore. there's no mystery to it. frodo sees the spider webs as soon as he goes into the cave, so it's like... i wonder what's coming next. this is one instance where they depart from the book, that makes absolutely no sense to me. in the book, frodo and sam don't see any webs or anything, and they don't even know what shelob is at first. they just sense something very evil behind them, and they don't see what it is until it comes creeping up slowly behind them. peter jackson could've had a great scene if he had kept with this, and went with how the book has frodo holding up the starglass to ward shelob away, but i guess he figured that's just not exciting enough so he had to go with the typical hollywood fight scene. lame. and would somebody explain to me, why eowyn disguised herself to ride to gondor, but later took off her mask as the riders were resting so that the entire troop could clearly see that she was a woman?! peter jackson.... that's a no no.

i wonder why i liked the movie when i first saw it. maybe it was just the anticipation of seeing one of my favorite books of all time come to life. now that i am rereading the books for the first time in years, perhaps that is having an effect on what i think of the movies. i always knew that the books would never be replaced by a movie, but i never felt this strongly against he movie before. but you never know, maybe i will come to like it in time.