50 Reasons Lord of the Rings Sucks

Pointless Waste of Time ^

[A.J.Armitage]

50 Reasons why
LORD OF THE RINGS


sucks

1. Fellowship of the Rings was shoved down our throats.
   
   I've heard some students are even forced to read some novelization of the movie in their literature classes. Ridiculous. Does Hollywood run our classrooms now?
   
   
2. Greed.
   
   Hollywood can't make a movie these days without crapping out a sequel the next year to squeeze more money out of the sheep. Guess what; there's ANOTHER LOTR movie coming this Christmas. Gee, I wonder what will bring Rocky out of retirement this time?
   
   
3. Quality Control at New Line.
   
   Millions of copies of the LOTR DVD have thick black bars at the bottom and top of the screen throughout the film. Didn't anyone catch this? You know what happens at the end, in the extreme foreground and extreme upper sky? Neither do I. Bush league, guys.
   
   
4. They switched Darrens on us!
   
   Look closely and you'll notice the human member of their party is played by two different actors at different points of the movie (it takes a sharp eye to notice, but one of them has red hair, one black).
   
   
5. Quality Control at New Line, II.
   
   In the massive Mt. Doom battle scene at the beginning of Fellowship of the Ring, a DVD pause reveals at least half a dozen of the 50,000 Orc Warrior extras are wearing modern tennis shoes.
   
   
6. Speaking of Orcs...
   
   The Orcs were obviously stolen from PC game maker Blizzard and its Warcraft series. Too bad Blizzard is apparently too scared to sue New Line over it.
   
   
7. Racism.
   
   Percentage of protagonists in Fellowship who are white: 100. Meanwhile the black antagonists and their black crow spies and their black glass seeing ball inhabit their black towers and perform black magic. Gosh, I wonder if there's some symbolism there?
   
   
8. Gold: The Stretchy Element.
   
   The ring, which is seen to be at least two inches in diameter at the beginning to fit the polish sausage-sized finger of Sauron, suddenly fits Frodo's child-sized finger later. I guess this movie takes place in a world where rings magically change sizes on their own.
   
   
9. Violence.
   
   Give me one reason that story couldn't have been told without all the fighting.
   
   
10. Horse sense.
    
    Why didn't they take horses on their quest? Or even better, why didn't Gandalf's giant flying bird friend haul them into Mordor? Watch out, Frodo! All of your methods of transportation have been swallowed by the Dark Lord of the Plot Hole!
    
    
11. Retracted.*
    
    See below.
    
    
12. Return of the Living Dead.
    
    If you watch closely during the Inn scene, Frodo and his crew are shown getting stabbed by the Ring Wraiths. Then, five seconds later, they are fine again. Note to the director: try proofreading your movie before you release it to the public.
    
    
13. Did someone say plot hole?
    
    Liv Tyler's character is seen easily defeating nine strong supernatural beings, even though she is clearly a woman.
    
    
14. The Battle Droid Syndrome.
    
    The mutated muscular soldiers of Mordor turned out to be hilariously ineffective soldiers, a dozen of them held off by a single dying human. Apparently they made the beasts by crossing Orcs, Goblins and the French.
    
    
15. Sloppy CGI.
    
    Gandalf's smoke boat is pretty impressive, but smoke cannot be made to travel horizontally, thus revealing it to be nothing but a cheap special effect.
    
    
16. The Asbestos Wizard.
    
    We all saw Gandalf fall into the molten core of Middle Earth after his battle with the firebeast thing. Well, I guess the Gandalf action figure must have sold well, because in the slap-together sequel coming up this year Gandalf is back. I wonder if they'll even bother to explain it. Maybe he'll be resurrected via voodoo, a la the corpse in Weekend at Bernie's II (look closely and you'll notice LOTR steals several elements from the WAB films).
    
    
17. Invisible Implausibility.
    
    Every time Frodo or Bilbo went invisible with the ring they should have also gone BLIND. Your eyes cannot function unless light is reflected off the cornea. If light passes through it (as must be the case with invisibility) sight is no longer possible. Also, rings do not turn you invisible.
    
    
18. The Asbestos Wizard, II.
    
    The giant fire beast thing at the end was breathing a firey breath hot enough to send heat-distortion waves through the air. The sheer temperature of the air should have burned off Gandalf's beard and eyebrows. None of my reading on evolutionary biology reveals a single reason why a particular race of humans would develop unflammable facial hair as this would provide practically no advantage in either survival or mating.
    
    
19. I'll have to rent that one.
    
    The rushed-through story the screenwriter threw in as the first ten minutes of Fellowship of the Ring looked a lot more interesting than the movie we were forced to watch. Why didn't somebody make a movie off that instead?
    
    
20. Magic Mechanics.
    
    Experts on the occult say in order for a wizard to floorspin a fully-grown man like Gandalf, he'd need three magical staffs, not two.
    
    
21. Finders, keepers.
    
    So Bilbo, who we are supposed to identify with as a protagonist, finds a piece of someone else's jewelry and just keeps it for himself? That's funny, because I would expect a good man to submit it to the local Lost and Found so it could be claimed by its owner. It makes me wonder if he bought that hillside house or if he was just squatting.
    
    
22. Go-Go Gadget Arrow Sprouter.
    
    Legolas shoots arrow after arrow at his enemies, and yet the number of arrows in his quiver never decreases. I guess elves have glands on their back that secrete arrows.
    
    
23. Watch out! He's going to explode!
    
    The heroes are shown eating again and again, and yet no one ever goes to the bathroom throughout their entire quest.
    
    
24. Meesa gonna make theesa movie suckah!
    
    The character of Gollum in The Two Towers will be entirely computer animated, in a cheap effort to cash in on Jar Jar Binks Mania. Thank you, Peter Jackson. Thank you right to Hell.
    
    
25. Propaganda.
    
    The Elves, clearly the most advanced and wise species, are also clearly gay.
    
    

26. Speaking of Elves...
    
    Elves are beautiful and wise and tall? Great warriors? Makers of fine lightweight weapons? Our modern knowledge of elves has observed only an ability to make cookies and toys. All the elves in the film are portrayed as living in a warm paradise (Rivendell) but our own information tells us the aforementioned group of toymaking elves work and thrive in the arctic. Hey, Mr. Jackson: Research is half of writing.
    
    
27. Homage or theft?
    
    The "happy village of little people" idea was stolen from Willow.
    
    
28. Homage or theft II?
    
    The wise old wizard character was stolen from Harry Potter.
    
    
29. Homage or theft III?
    
    The "travelling on our quest through a corn field" scene was stolen from Shrek.
    
    
30. Homage or theft IV?
    
    The character of the rebellious-but-helpful Ranger was stolen from Val Kilmer in Willow.
    
    
31. Homage or theft V?
    
    The concept of the violent dwarf was based on Al Pacino.
    
    
32. Homage or theft VI?
    
    The "old man looking through the door hatch at the approaching little people" scene was stolen from A Clockwork Orange.
    
    
33. Homage or theft VII?
    
    The cantina scene with a noisy bar filled with a mix of otherworldly species was stolen from Cecile B. DeMille's One Night in an Alien Bar.
    
    
34. Homage or theft VIII?
    
    The incident with the flock of evil magical spying crows serving the All-Seeing Eye was based on an actual incident.
    
    
35. Homage or theft IX?
    
    The character of the Giant Evil Flaming All-Seeing Eye was based on former President Jimmy Carter.
    
    
36. Homage or theft X?
    
    The character of Elrond was based on Agent Smith from The Matrix.
    
    
37. Weighty issues.
    
    AKA "Plot Hole No. 273." Even with all that walking and light eating, the character of Sam only got fatter.
    
    
38. Realism, schmealism.
    
    Liv Tyler's immortal elf volunteers to give up her eternal life for a single romance with a human man. Could any man really be that well endowed? I find it unlikely.
    
    
39. Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow.
    
    The most advanced civilization is that of the elves, which are long-haired, new-age types? Sorry, Mr. Jackson, but modern science has proven that in any modern civilization, hippies would be extinct.
    
    
40. Too many notes.
    
    No movie should be over two hours long. Did we need that whole thing in the mine? Didn't it seem like they were just adding pointless scenes in the middle to pad it? It's like they decided beforehand they wanted three hours and used filler to flesh it out.
    
    
41. Too many notes, II.
    
    I just want to re-emphasize the above point. There is no reason entertainment can't be concise.
    
    
42. Too many notes, III.
    
    Too many characters to keep track of. The dwarf was clearly only there as a token dwarf character to sell tickets to lucrative movie-going dwarf demographic. Lose him.
    
    
43. Rationalization for violence.
    
    Why is the black octopus creature painted as the bad guy when it attacks, when one of the fellowship had clearly been throwing rocks at it?
    
    
44. The Shoeless Land.
    
    The Hobbits both 1) refuse to wear shoes and 2) run a livestock-based farming economy. Wouldn't they constantly be stepping in crap? Why doesn't the movie address this issue?
    
    
45. Casting.
    
    Why couldn't Frodo have been played by Christopher Walken?
    
    
46. Casting, II.
    
    Why couldn't Gandalf have been played by Bruce Campbell?
    
    
47. Casting, III.
    
    Why couldn't Bilbo have been played by Vin Diesel?
    
    
48. Casting, IV.
    
    Why couldn't the Ranger have been played by a monkey?
    
    
49. The Score.
    
    The background music wasn't nearly funky enough for me.
    
    
50. What's that smell?
    
    As bad as the Lucasfilm leaks were last year, the filmmakers of The Two Towers already have the novelization out in paperback. I've seen it at Barnes & Noble already. As if we needed any less of a reason to go see it.

*RETRACTED REASONS LORD OF THE RINGS SUCKS:

11. Damn you, gravity!

The giant firebeast thing is defeated by Gandalf when he destroys the bridge, sending the creature plunging to its death... despite the fact that it has wings.

This was retracted when a reader pointed out that the wings, like the rest of the beast, were made of shadow and fire and thus would be useless for flight. Thanks for the tip!

[Jhoffa_]

Finally, a LOTR post I enjoyed..

thank you.

[valkyrieanne]

LOTR has always seemed to me very similar to the old German epic, Nibelungenlied ("Song of the Nibelungs") which was also the basis for the series of operas by Wagner.

Me too. I hadn't heard the English-mythology angle (sounds plausible too.) But I remember from a class on CS Lewis learning that both Lewis and Tolkien were both fascinated by & saturated in Norse mythology. Before anyone claims that Tolkien immersed himself in this area because he was an "occultist," let me point out that it was his *job* - he was a specialist in ancient European languages and of course was deeply familiar with their literature, folklore, and mythology.

In fact, that's what makes the story so good, and what I liked about the second Jackson film in particular. The Norse gods die individually; thus the five-handkerchief story of the murdered god Baldur. Love relationships don't really work out well in Norse mythology, and Jackson gave us a little hint of the end of Aragorn & Arwen (again, a 3-handkerchief tear jerker.)

Finally, the Norse gods know that they will die at the end of their history, in the final battle of Ragnarok. They know their tragic end is coming, yet they fight on in a battle against the giants, werewolves, other assorted evil guys *anyway.* The Two Towers are definitely suffused with that dark Norse sadness, even though the story (like Christianity itself) ultimately does have a happy ending.

[unspun]

Is this supposed to be humorous? i.e., complaining that that "novelization" is already out?

(I'd much rather sit through nine eventual hours of LOTR, than read through this.)

[aruanan]

Actually, the Orcs were produced (not by yanking them out full-grown wrapped in goo from the ground, as in the movie) by the evil Valar Melkor (Sauron's Boss) in the time after the creation of the Elves in Middle-Earth, but before Men were created.

Yes, the ground goo seemed to not ring a bell.

[snippy_about_it]

The beauty of books. I fell in love with the story when I read the trilogy. I'd rather leave the drama to my imagination and don't plan to see the movies. The trailers already don't look like the imagination conjured up in my head when I read the books.

[Cleburne]

And why are "fairy tales" wrong? Are you to say that anything that doesn't seem plausble must be thrown out? If so, then I suppose we should pack up our very illogical faith and settle in for the gloom of rationalism, where everything is nicely ordered and there are no mysteries (though that it is, of course, hardly true). It might be dangerous to view the natural world as anything more than the logical, if artless in formation, product of chance. Or if there is some God surely He can no longer be involved in the whole thing, as that would cause our solid steady reason to hit roadbumps in figuring things out logically. After all, the supernatural protruding on our logic certainly makes for hard going.

Certainly "realistic" fiction has its place, and is perhaps the most important of fiction, for a good realistic work such as, say, Crime and Punishment, shows us our sin vividly and inexescapably. But if all we had was the grim, logical reality of sin, we would be miserable, joyless people, and very much doomed to black death. But we know that "realism" is not all that is real; that what is not seen is "realer" than what is seen.

And so we see the need for what we call myth and religion: we see it all through man's history, from the Epic of Gilgamesh to the Odessy to Beowulf to Star Wars. Man realizes, most of the time, that there is something unseen, and he tries to explain it. But most myths and religions are not true, and only partially fulfill man's longings: for they lack a true knowledge of God, and most mportantly, they lack His Son, the Savior of man, the great King, the Captain of the Starry Hosts. And we find that, like all myths and religions, the true God does not fit within the confines of man's reason: indeed, He exceeds them, and all myth and religion, surpassing man's fallen nature. He exceeds both our reason and our fancies- His design and guidance are greater than any scheme concocted in man's mind, and His mercies and love exceed any idea any man could have had about God.

The wisdom of God is foolishness to the scholar of the age. One cannot boil it down into "realism", but then one cannot fully express it in "fairy tales"- rather, He exceeds both, but we can express His nature and truth in both. So it is unwise to throw the faerie world and its wonder out the window, for in doing so we come close to deciding that our logic decides all: and let it be known, the wisdom of the cross is foolishness to the "wise".

[JenB]

What is it that Tolkien said? The man who most fears and hates "escape" is - a jailer.

There are, sadly, no Elves in this world. But if they are they too would be created by God.

[maxwell]

ROTFLMAO!!!

That is outstanding, dude... That warrants a PING and a TOAST... \_/ \_/ \_/

[MeekOneGOP]

That is outstanding, dude... That warrants a PING and a TOAST... \_/ \_/ \_/

LOL ! Need some hep, my FRiend? heh heh !

[Capriole]

Is this serious?

No, of course not. It wouldn't have been funny if the author meant it because it was so stupid.

[Jael]

Hi, I am glad you wrote back. :-)

Let's continue this sometimes. I also homeschool, so we are kind of busy right now, trying to get some things finished before the end of the year.

I hope to discuss more with you later.

[Jael]

Thanks for a thoughtful post. :-)

[js1138]

I "got it" on the 3rd one & laughed all the way through.

170+ posts so far and some still aren't getting it.

[Deb]

Very clever.

[The Coopster]

20 sided dice! LOL!!!!

Only the true nerds will get that one.....

[The Coopster]

bump for later reading, and head-shaking at how some people can find evil in anything.....

[motzman]

A very used copy of The Monster Manual had already been won on a previous thread, so sandflea had to get the consolation prize...

[The Coopster]

Oh, man......THAT drags me back.......

[AppyPappy]

And a very Merry Chistmas to you!