The Lord Of The Rings has been described as an ass-destroyer of a trilogy, especially if youre one of those thats been forced to sit through a marathon of all three DVD/Blu-Ray special edition length versions. At 11 hours and 20 minutes, thats legitimately enough to induce night sweats. We recommend having your nurse turn you twice during each film to avoid bedsores. But its not just your physical comfort you have to watch out for here. The central issue with watching these films as every Lord Of The Rings fan insists you must, (one after the other with breaks and no talking) is that while The Fellowship Of The Ring takes a while to get going, it is unquestionably the best of all three of the films. The extended sequences set in the mines of Moria are phenomenal cinema whichever way you look at it, and the production design, seen for the first time, is riveting in its attention to detail even for non-Tolkien fans. Its incredibly faithful, too - genuine fans of the novels have been known to watch The Fellowship Of The Ring with slack-jawed amazement, as every single one of their adolescent dreams is realised on the screen in front of them, even discounting the exclusion of Tom Bombadil (who everyone hates anyway). And then it goes on. And it goes on. And it goes on. The Two Towers suffers from the problem of having no real story to tell and three hours to tell it anyway, while The Return Of The King gives us exactly the ending we expected and then another one, with a fade to black and then another one, with a fade to black and so on, for what feels like another eleven hours, but is probably only twenty minutes. We hear that after the third part of the wholly unnecessary Hobbit trilogy is released on home media, fans will insist that the only way to watch Lord Of The Rings is to see all six extended versions in order, for around 20 hours of Middle Earth action. We understand that people will be forced to wear giant nappies to avoid toilet breaks, and that anyone yawning at any point after hour four will be taken outside and shot. Run. Run for your lives.
Professional writer, punk werewolf and nesting place for starfish. Obsessed with squid, spirals and story. I publish short weird fiction online at desincarne.com, and tweet nonsense under the name Jack The Bodiless. You can follow me all you like, just don't touch my stuff.
