10 Problems Nobody Wants To Admit About The Lord Of The Rings Movies

5. The Pacing Is All Over The Place

Think, for a moment, how much ground the characters cover across the span of the first Lord of the Rings movie. In The Fellowship of the Ring, the hobbits go on a truly epic journey that takes them across the length of Middle-Earth. And then The Two Towers kicks in, and Frodo and Sam seem to move the space of, like, eight miles in the whole film. This isn't necessarily Peter Jackson's fault, because the blueprint of the stories come courtesy of Tolkien's novels. But from a cinematic perspective it also creates a sense of fumbled pacing when you consider the movies as an entire trilogy: with so much ground covered in The Fellowship of the Ring, the distance in The Two Towers - a film that runs a similar length of three hours - pales in comparison, creating an uneasy equilibrium. And then there's the Return of the King and its geographical "cheating" - characters are able to travel distances that took an entire film for them to traverse when it's deemed necessary for the narrative, which feels a bit inaccurate and dishonest in retrospect.