General / Off-Topic Lord Of The Rings - 18 Years Later

CMDR Cosmic Spacehead

CMDR Cosmic Spacehead
My god man, this movie hasn't aged well at all!

I just tried to watch the first movie, the opening scene with Salmon-whats-his-face, is just bad!

CGI looks naff, acting is naff, it's all naff!
It literally looks like a budget B movie. :ROFLMAO:

Skipping much further ahead, after all the nonsense talking to where Froggo-whats-his-face gets stabbed by a ghost-thingie, then and soon(in several hours of movie)-to-be-king-i-dont-remember, shoo's off a ghost-thingie with a flaming torch, and sets another one on fire, who casually seems to walk off set while burning.

I honestly don't remember this movie being that bad. I mean, I can still watch Ghostbusters II, and think "that's not bad for an 80s movie!"

I've given up watching LoTR. Can't do it.

What other older movies have you seen, that have aged incredibly badly?
 

Alec Turner

Alec Turner
YvJB6ot.gif
 

Shadowdancer

Shadowdancer
CMDR Cosmic Spacehead said:
My god man, this movie hasn't aged well at all!
Click to expand...
Neither have the books. I wouldn't recommend reading them for leisure. They're insightful as a common ancestor for most of today's High Fantasy fiction, but then you look at the Poetic Edda and realise it's mostly fanfiction.

As for the movies, I thought the first two looked bad even when they came out, especially the first one with lots of repetitive camera movement and really bad mattes, putting it way below standards for practical and digital effects that other franchises had well exceeded over a decade earlier; my favourite movie to quote in that regard is Star Trek 6 (1991) in its sweet spot of practical and digital effects making for a gorgeous experience. The Two Towers ran into the additional issue of the book being a solid chunk of landscape fetish and babble with very few interesting or relevant events that no screenwriter could hope to salvage into an engaging script. Return of the King was alright in a cinematographic aspect, and it's also based on the least boring of the books, so that gets a passing grade.

Offhand I can't think of other examples that really stand out, even looking through my collection; there are movies I have watched only once, but it's more because my taste has changed over the years. Sure, there are things like The Last Starfighter, Buffy, or Babylon 5 that look totally zany by today's standards, but I still enjoy watching those every now and then.
 

Morbad

Morbad
CMDR Cosmic Spacehead said:
What other older movies have you seen, that have aged incredibly badly?
Click to expand...

Almost anything that made overt use of CGI during that fifteen year long transition period where it was becoming cheaper than practical effects. Probably easier to point out the handful of early-mid CGI heavy films that aged passably well (T2, Jurassic Park) than the hundreds that didn't.

Most 80s Cold-War or post-apocalyptic films, especially if Patrick Swayze or Charlie Sheen are in them, with the notable exceptions of all the Max Maxes, which keep getting better.

Ethaidan said:
So, a movie you never really liked doesn't seem to have aged well.
Click to expand...

Don't need to like something to acknowledge that it has or has not aged well.

Shadowdancer said:
Neither have the books. I wouldn't recommend reading them for leisure. They're insightful as a common ancestor for most of today's High Fantasy fiction, but then you look at the Poetic Edda and realise it's mostly fanfiction.
Click to expand...

I know the books are the sacred cow of modernish fantasy fiction, but they are badly paced and have an inane overarching plot. That the stories are largely derivative doesn't really bother me though.
 

jasonbarron

jasonbarron
Morbad said:
I know the books are the sacred cow of modernish fantasy fiction, but they are badly paced and have an inane overarching plot. That the stories are largely derivative doesn't really bother me though.
Click to expand...
I'm really struggling to think of any other fantasy epic that even came close. Tolkien's writing and grasp of the English language was superlative, whilst most of his imitators were not only derivative but also somewhat lacking in actually writing ability and flair.
 

Manticore

Manticore
jasonbarron said:
I'm really struggling to think of any other fantasy epic that even came close. Tolkien's writing and grasp of the English language was superlative, whilst most of his imitators were not only derivative but also somewhat lacking in actually writing ability and flair.
Click to expand...
Like to name names...... ;)

In the truest sense and context of that: damn straight.
 

Morbad

Morbad
jasonbarron said:
I'm really struggling to think of any other fantasy epic that even came close.
Click to expand...

I can think of several I enjoyed more. The Earthsea Cycle, the Broken Earth trilogy, and the Witcher Saga, for example.

jasonbarron said:
Tolkien's writing and grasp of the English language was superlative, whilst most of his imitators were not only derivative but also somewhat lacking in actually writing ability and flair.
Click to expand...

I don't disagree, but no level of command over the language can make up for what I consider to be a mediocre plot. It's a well told story, but not a great story.

I don't have much praise for his imitators either, because the fundamental formula isn't one I'm terribly keen on. Oh, I've read some of them, and enjoyed a few, but those were mostly self-imposed homework for background purposes, such as if I were running a table-top game using the same setting.
 

varonica

varonica
CMDR Cosmic Spacehead said:
I honestly don't remember this movie being that bad. I mean, I can still watch Ghostbusters II, and think "that's not bad for an 80s movie!"

I've given up watching LoTR. Can't do it.

What other older movies have you seen, that have aged incredibly badly?
Click to expand...

It's a matter of focus, ghostbusters was primarily about the characters, even if the effects were a lot worse it would still be a passably good 80's movie, whereas LOTRO is nothing without the effects, the characters were remarkably shallow...unless you had read all the books and understood the backstory..., the story now feels formulaic but thatt;s maybe because so many works following drew from the Tolkein works in so many ways. Of course leaving Tom Bombadil out was probably one of the best decisions made because even if you had read every word Tolkein has ever written he still made no sense at all. But that's a personal opinion of course.

Now old movies that have aged well are character and story driven, I still get a kick out of Forbidden Planet and This Island Earth and have rewatched them a time or two over the years, but I have never rewatched LOTRO.
 

CMDR Cosmic Spacehead

CMDR Cosmic Spacehead
I'll have to admit, I've never read the books.

I just took one look at the size of the first one, and went "nope".
I'm not a big reader, mainly because I'm actually quite a slow reader, so even a small book can take a really long time to read, so I'd rather watch the movie version and save some time. 😁
 

Vasea Azure

Vasea Azure
I never been a huge fan of the LOTR movies as my first contact with Tolkien was by my mom reading me entire thing to sleep when I was a kid and since then I had certain image of this world in my head that was different from Peter J one. And I`m kind of with ya OP that especially the first one does not aged well to the degree so dont feel bad, you not alone haha! I did enjoyed the The Desolation of Smaug tho, not sure why as it follows same vision but as a movie it was a great time waster.

As for your question - as a kid I was a massive fan of Never Ending Story trilogy and thought about it like it was the best kids movie ever made. After a years I watched it again and oh boy.... what a stinker :D
 
Last edited:

Shadowdancer

Shadowdancer
(edit, preface) The below may come off as really dismissiv of Tolkien's work, but I totally recognise that it was and is important to the entire genre of (YA) fantasy writing. I'm not saying that Tolkien was a total hack, but I do not think that his most-used works are the holy grail of writing that stands ensconced as untouchable mastercraft for all eternity like some people make it out to be.

The big weakness I see in Tolkien's writing is a lack of editorial oversight. He basically took the Edda and the universal good versus evil and went from there, building a very detailed world around those and some of his own ideas, went on lots of tangents like inventing entire langages and detailed backstories for entire genalogies, and then pressed them into books like sausage into skins.

There's such a thing as too much sausage, even if it's really interesting sausage, and a good editor will take care that there's just enough and that it's spiced well. Skip that and you end up with Episode 1 to 3, which are IMO not totally dissimilar to the general feeling of LotR. The last one was fairly alright.

A format like The Hobbit (even though that's incredibly naive at times) or collections of short stories that don't read like the Bible without the exciting parts (coughcoughSilmarillion, no Mr. Eddings, that wasn't a good idea, please don't write the Rivan Co... crap!) would IMO have made for better reading to convey the geeral feel of the world bit by bit, and the main LotR arc could well have fitted into something like The Belgariad (again, Eddings). Intead we ended up with that monolithic tour de force informing a few decades of fantasy writing. If compare it to something like Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun or maybe Tom Toner's Amaranthine books if you are more into the SF branch of fantasy, you really start to wonder how you managed to stay awake.
 
Last edited:

Agony_Aunt

Agony_Aunt
CMDR Cosmic Spacehead said:
I'll have to admit, I've never read the books.

I just took one look at the size of the first one, and went "nope".
I'm not a big reader, mainly because I'm actually quite a slow reader, so even a small book can take a really long time to read, so I'd rather watch the movie version and save some time. 😁
Click to expand...

Then if anyone recommends to you Tad Williams, give him a hard pass. He makes Tolkein look like a lightweight.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom