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

2. The Dialogue Is Obvious & Bit Naff, Actually

It's not entirely clear as to how The Lord of the Rings somehow earned itself a free pass on the dialogue front, but rewatching these films it's plain to see that so much of it is awkward, cliche, flat and just so plainly obvious: so many of the dialogue cues uttered by the characters feel plucked out of a "Movie Dialogue 101" handbook. It's like Jackson and his co-writers inserted a bunch of filler lines and then forgot to go back and change them. Cheesy lines such as "I think I'm getting the hang of this!" are scattered throughout the movies - the sorts of banal, crowd-pleasing lines that any good scriptwriter would steer clear from (George Lucas, eat your heart out.). Then there's the on-the-nose exposition, which is just everywhere. "They are not all accounted for, the lost Seeing Stones. We do not know who else may be watching," Gandalf tells Saruman, who already knows that. And yet they're clogging up Jackson's script to no end, a notion that most people seem to have forgiven on account of the fact that they love these movies and fail to see that Tolkien's dialogue has been neutered. Gone is the poetry, replaced with the arbitrary.