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Discs of the Rings
I got my Lord of the Rings Fellowship of the Ring Special Edition DVD boxed set oompah oompah ftang ftang ole biscuit barrel yesterday, and of course had to watch the entire 200-minute movie immediately.
Spoilers follow, perhaps, if you've not seen the movie and not read the books.
Verdict: The extra half-hour is good. There's a nice bit of character development - backstories and little interactions between various folk to flesh out their characters somewhat. Of the three plot points I thought were skipped over in the cinema release, two were addressed: the reforging of Isildur's sword (Narsil, right?) and DAMMIT I've forgotten the second because someone came into the office while I was writing this. The third awkward point, IMHO, was Gimli's transformation from an elf-hating dwarf into one who didn't want to leave Lothlorien. I still don't think this was adequately covered; he basically jumps from elf-hater to being doe-eyed over Galadriel with no intervening action.
As for the quality, well, the only review I've read so far was raving about the perfection of the transfer to DVD. Nuh. In the opening sequence, the black screen with the voiceover, the right-hand side of my television was a mass of MPEG artifacts. At various other points in the movie, the CGI was painfully obvious: even the shot of Gollum in Moria seemed to scream "CGI overlay". The Nazgûl frequently looked like a Photoshop beginner had done the head masking, and so forth. This kinda distracted me a little from the movie. Of course, it's probably because I didn't spend enough money on my DVD player or TV or something. I might try watching it on the laptop, since there I get the benefit of a faster DVD player, some kick-ass MPEG decoding (yay open source!), and an LCD screen.
I've yet to check out any of the extras. I think, all things considered, I would have preferred if they'd been able to get the movie onto a single disc and leave the alternative soundtrack versions for one of the three accompanying discs, although I really don't know what the soundtrack:picture ratio is and I suspect that dictated somewhat how the bits would be laid out. The audio in general is pretty cool; it's nice to see a Region 2 release with DTS, because it's woefully lacking in a lot of Region 2 releases for reasons that are unclear to me.
On the whole, though, I can't complain. It's still an excellent movie, even taking into account the repeated dramatic closeups of a hand opening to reveal the ring (it's not in Rimrunner's LotR Drinking Game, but she has a sufficient ring/hand rule), and most of the emotional hooks still, well, hooked. I will no doubt spend further time perusing the rest of this work.
Spoilers follow, perhaps, if you've not seen the movie and not read the books.
Verdict: The extra half-hour is good. There's a nice bit of character development - backstories and little interactions between various folk to flesh out their characters somewhat. Of the three plot points I thought were skipped over in the cinema release, two were addressed: the reforging of Isildur's sword (Narsil, right?) and DAMMIT I've forgotten the second because someone came into the office while I was writing this. The third awkward point, IMHO, was Gimli's transformation from an elf-hating dwarf into one who didn't want to leave Lothlorien. I still don't think this was adequately covered; he basically jumps from elf-hater to being doe-eyed over Galadriel with no intervening action.
As for the quality, well, the only review I've read so far was raving about the perfection of the transfer to DVD. Nuh. In the opening sequence, the black screen with the voiceover, the right-hand side of my television was a mass of MPEG artifacts. At various other points in the movie, the CGI was painfully obvious: even the shot of Gollum in Moria seemed to scream "CGI overlay". The Nazgûl frequently looked like a Photoshop beginner had done the head masking, and so forth. This kinda distracted me a little from the movie. Of course, it's probably because I didn't spend enough money on my DVD player or TV or something. I might try watching it on the laptop, since there I get the benefit of a faster DVD player, some kick-ass MPEG decoding (yay open source!), and an LCD screen.
I've yet to check out any of the extras. I think, all things considered, I would have preferred if they'd been able to get the movie onto a single disc and leave the alternative soundtrack versions for one of the three accompanying discs, although I really don't know what the soundtrack:picture ratio is and I suspect that dictated somewhat how the bits would be laid out. The audio in general is pretty cool; it's nice to see a Region 2 release with DTS, because it's woefully lacking in a lot of Region 2 releases for reasons that are unclear to me.
On the whole, though, I can't complain. It's still an excellent movie, even taking into account the repeated dramatic closeups of a hand opening to reveal the ring (it's not in Rimrunner's LotR Drinking Game, but she has a sufficient ring/hand rule), and most of the emotional hooks still, well, hooked. I will no doubt spend further time perusing the rest of this work.
Gimli + Galadriel, sitting in a tree
(Anonymous) 2002-11-20 09:20 am (UTC)(link)[Ferret]