23rd Favorite Movie - Lord of the Rings Trilogy

Make sure you have read the first post in this series ("My 50 Favorite Movies") before you read on...

I know some of you will think I am cheating by counting this entire series as one movie. But I have a couple reasons for it:

1. The movies are all so close to one another in terms of quality that to rank them against other movies would be difficult. I CAN say that I liked the third one the best, then the first one, and then Two Towers. But rating each one against other movies like Saving Private Ryan and Jaws feels like splitting hairs to me.

2. To the non-hobbit/elf loving reader out there... three posts on LOTR would have been quite the bore. Plus, it's my list and you're not paying me anything to read this so I can do whatever I want! Ahhhhh... the beauty of blogging.

A great deal of my childhood was comprised of three things: baseball, Boy Scouts, and monsters. My older brother could probably say the same thing about his childhood. I don't know what it is like now, but we lived in a neighborhood without any other kids my age and I didn't have any other siblings, so I was always tagging along with him. One of the infamous family videos is of me as a kid smashing the clay Godzilla figures that my brother had left sitting on the table to dry. Yup, my big bro introduced me to monsters, Dungeons and Dragons, and Lord of the Rings (although my mom, a librarian, may have been partially responsible for that last one).

In the first grade, I submitted a story of epic proportions to the school newspaper entitled "Samwise and the Bats". It was a sequel to LOTR in which Samwise and his dog, Woof-Woof, find a new ring and whenever he places it on his finger, bats and other monsters appear that he has to fight. The story ends with the bats capturing Samwise and taking him to their lair and Woof-Woof triumphantly saving the day. I still have a copy lying around somewhere if you want to check it out sometime. Tolkien's estate tried to buy the copyright from me but I turned them down.

All this to say... if these three movies had been released when I was seven, I would have wet my pants.

My friend Chris C (who was Dungeonmaster when we used to get together and play D&D during recess) described them as a "masterpiece". I can't think of a better word. Peter Jackson made all the perfect choices: the perfect actors, perfect music, perfect location, perfect special effects... I know hardcore fans of the books dispute his decision to leave things out like Tom Bombadill or the final confrontation with Sauron at the shire, but with each movie at 3 hours+ already, he had to cut some parts.

I only have one complaint, and it isn't even Peter Jackson's fault.

***BIG TIME MAJOR SPOILER ALERT***

I kind of wish that Frodo would have died.

It's funny, even though as kids my brother and I were really into LOTR stuff, we never actually read the books. We had audio tapes that would tell part of the story, and children's picture books, and the 197o's movie that was part live action and part animation, but we didn't have the full story. So watching these movies together when he was back for Christmas (remember a new one came out every December from 2001-2003), we kept expecting that Frodo was going to die in the end. My brother's wife, Betsy, had read the books when she was little and even she thought Frodo died in the end. In the movies they did such a good job of making it seem like there was no hope for him and Samwise - that this really was a suicide mission - it just seemed impossible for them to get out alive.

Here's the real problem I have with the ending... I just think that to go that far... to be 9 hours invested in this thing... to have the ring destroyed because Gollum got too close to the edge while holding it and fell in, well, that was a little disappointing to me. I think it would have been better if Frodo died a heroic, sacrificial death by plunging into the fire while wearing the ring. That would have been way better than Gollum slipping and falling in. But this is what I REALLY wish would have happened: Frodo, Samwise and Gollum all make it to the fiery pit of Mount Doom, and Frodo pulls his "no, it's mine, my precious" thing which is cool because it shows the power of the ring over anyone and makes Smeagle into more of a helpless victim. And then what should have happened is Gollum grabs Frodo, bites off his finger, and you think he is about to put the ring back on his scaly finger but then you see him become Smeagle in his eyes and he plunges himself into the fire carrying the ring, not wanting to live as Gollum anymore and never wanting the ring to do that to another person again. That would have been boss!

Anyways, I haven't had the taste for LOTR since we did a marathon with the high schoolers a couple years ago one day. We watched all three movies - extended editions - back-to-back-to-back. It was excruciating. I was so sick of battles by the end of that. It was over 12 hours with the extrage footage added. Just brutal. But one of these days, after I have fully recovered from that nightmare, it will be fun to revisit a true masterpiece and feel like I am seven again.