Still
digging my rewatch of The Lord of the
Rings trilogy. Back in the day, I
loved the first movie, but this one seriously upped the ante for me. It was great to go back and experience this
film again (premise spoilers.)
With the
fellowship scattered after the events of the first film, the story takes three
paths. Frodo and Sam have continued
forward alone on their quest to destroy the Ring; on their path, they encounter
Gollum, a former keeper of the Ring driven mad by his desire for it. Merry and Pippin try to escape capture by the
Orcs, and as Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli work to rescue them, their journey
takes them to Rohan, where dark forces are working against a kingdom of
men. There are trials, betrayals, feats
of courage, and a climactic battle, and all the while, the Ring gets closer and
closer to Mordor.
I can’t
help but keep comparing this trilogy to The
Hobbit, and I’m still kind of floored by how well-put-together these feel
by comparison. It reflects, I think, how
The Lord of the Rings was made for
the story it was telling while The Hobbit
was contorted into a story it wasn’t. In
The Hobbit, I start losing interest
whenever Bilbo isn’t around, because for me, the films are meant to be about
him, and whenever they’re not, they start to get lost. But The
Lord of the Rings is meant to be a big epic with lots of different stuff
going on, so I don’t mind when the members of the fellowship take different
paths – it’s a little more akin to something like Game of Thrones (although less sprawling and not segmented into
individual episodes,) where a group of characters can be offscreen for quite a
while before we check in with them again.
Here, all the individual parts work for me. I love watching Frodo and Sam’s journey (more
on Gollum in a minute,) the battle of Helm’s Deep still gets me, and even the
less-interesting bits with Pippin, Merry, and the Ents are okay because 1)
they’re pretty brief, just enough to keep the characters present, and 2) the
whole point of their segment is being away from the action and feeling
stranded, wanting to help.
I said
I’d revisit the CGI with this film, and I’d say the results are mixed. The massive CGI stuff, like the Orc hordes
look a little more video-gamey to my modern eyes, though I think it’s still
used relatively sparingly compared to
The Hobbit, where I thought the CGI
battle stuff went way overboard. More
notable is Gollum. Watching An Unexpected Journey for the first
time, I thought Gollum looked about the same, but revisiting The Two Towers, I can see that there
were some improvements over time. In
general, the motion-capture on Gollum looks damn good for the time – just shy
of real, I’d say. The biggest detractor
isn’t the animation on him itself, but rather how he’s integrated into the
scenes. It looks a little bit like he’s
moving around on top of the frame instead of being in it, and that’s where I
think The Hobbit did better with him,
making him look like he fit.
That
said, Andy Serkis’s performance here is historic. These days, you see motion-capture characters
all the time, but his Gollum was something revolutionary in its day. It was only uphill from there in terms of the
actual technology, and his performance is just so crazy good. The voice, the movements, the energy –
everything is absolutely perfect for the character (and by the way, extra kudos
to Elijah Wood and Sean Astin for acting so well against Serkis writhing around
in a mo-cap suit in the days when no one was doing that yet – that takes
talent, too.) Other new cast members of
note are an engaging Miranda Otto as Eowyn, Karl Urban as Eomer (used briefly
but well,) Brad Dourif killing it as Wormtongue, and David Wenham doing a nice
job as Faramir.
Warnings
Violence,
scary stuff, drinking/smoking, and thematic elements.
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