Toyworld

Rating: Null/10 (11 March 2015)

By now it's clear what they needed to do here, to wholly reinvent the story as prelude to the apocalypse of LOTR. Then we could have momentum, imports, deep orchestration, destiny as foreknowledge of inevitables. The book was not originally so, it was modestly conceived as a standalone with the mythology expanded and embellished in later years up until Tolkien's death and beyond. Instead we have tacky interjections of LOTR and the thin book blown up into a funpark ride. A failure.
But this lets me talk about something else. Why LOTR worked so well is because we had an immersive story, or marvelous stretches of it, seen through kids' eyes (hobbits) as they encountered ancient beings of unfathomable power, and we had a map of the larger world that we flitted back and forth to keep up with the journey, an inner view we explored and one from above that we had at our fingertips. We were swept.
Of the three films this is the one that perhaps comes closest to having some resemblance, with distinct armies coming from all four directions and converging on the same valley for the epic stand. Nearly the whole film takes place there. There is a sense of larger machinery beyond these horizons, one of which is Mordor. But there's also no sense of real adventure in a world we explore, at one point we travel up north merely to see an army advancing from there.
There's not much else to say; the whole is a giant toyworld. The best these can be is a pile of material for someone to edit into a single film that serves as introduction to LOTR marathons, I hear this has already happened online.