Dork World - Yap Yap Yap...

Rating: 1/10 (21 December 2001)

Does the prospect of watching elves, warriors and wizards talk and talk and talk, interrupted by seven or eight nearly identical battle/peril sequences appeal to you? If you liked Willow, Legend, Dune, Spawn, Gladiator this is pretty much the same thing. If you liked Star Wars (which singlehandedly ruined movies) you'll like this garbagy sermon. George Lucas stole most of his Star Wars story from this. This movie has the same things wrong with it that all costly blockbusters do. They're too expensive to risk being original so you get a lot of scenes that barely mask their origins in previous blockbusters. You get thrill-ride special effects sequences (that aren't very thrilling) in place of any really engaging ideas. Characters yammer with faux-profundity for 3 hours. A script like this is for people who resent having to find meaning themselves and just want the characters to tell them what a movie means. Then they can declare it "high-art" because of it's pseudo-poetic pretensions (Spawn, Final Fantasy) and it's Wagnerian pretensions. I guess that makes paintings of English cottages with thatched rooves (you can buy at a starving artists sale) masterpieces too. You'd have to be under five to miss any of the supposed "allegorical" meaning here.
I doubt you'll remember a single line from it after you leave. It lacks subtlety, a unifying idea, a volume-knob, anything entertaining or challenging etc. This is a tedious by-the-books filmed book. An overwrought score (ripped off again from Karl Orff's Carmina Burana) attempts to make you feel emotions that the script has neglected. A huge percentage of webkid/Tolkein fans saw it the first two days and have front-loaded positive reviews acros the web. Hopefully the second wave of opinions will push the title off of top ten lists where it does not belong. It might be the number one lifless filmed book of all time, but it ain't a film. This is not the worst movie ever made but it is utterly mediocre with lazy scripting & visualization; a catalog of the ever-lowering standards that became accepatable in movies over the last decade of the twentieth century. There is little that's unique or memorable in this movie. The chases in this movie look exactly like what chases have looked like in films for seventy years.
There are plenty of early warning signs that it's a lemon: Narration that obfuscates and embroiders before you even get your bearings (remember Dune?). Leaden lines of expository dialogue tell you things instead of showing them to you. Every fifteen minutes someone spouts "We're nearing the (blank) of (blank) i.e, the Pit of Shimmwatz, the Caves of Killjoy, the Chasm of Infinite Boredom, etc... The names are unintelligible and the effect is comical. It's just an arbitrary sequence of events that occur along the path to a goal, which is never even reached ( ! ). It has no dramatic arc.
Whether this journey went on for 90 minutes or 3 hours makes no difference to fans because the generation that thinks Star Wars is a good movie doesn't realize that SW chucked pacing, character development or even building a story. Hopefully digital epics will wear out their welcome much the same way the pre-digital epics from the fifties and sixties did. It's not good that actors are capable of reading a script like this and thinking it's good, but it's worse that pre-hyped audience is waiting to call it a masterpiece. This movie is junk. It's really depressing that people could mistake this for even an adequate movie.
Tolkein fans are gushing over it because they bring feelings (established while reading the book) with them and project them onto the movie. But you get the sense that these people would think a film about three people sitting around talking about hobbits would be a masterpiece too. If you're interested in a movie and it's a little pretentious, anything you like is a masterpiece. But, whether a director has reverentially embalmed a book is not decent criteria for declaring a film a masterpiece. The geeks who are saying so have no higher goal for a movie than that it be made from a book they love. The "kewl" visuals resembling the understimulating CD-ROM game Myst are a plus. The fans are spastic to get online to tell you that it's a masterpiece AND that it doesn't match the way they visualized it. Hey guess what, that's not any decent films job!
The final scene of the movie in which two hobbits confirm that they are great friends as they move off to address the threat the movie has been plodding towards for 3 hours, is absurd. This isn't the kind of story where the friendship of 2 hobbits means anything conclusive; Getting to THE POINT would have been swell.
Bring a cast iron butt and an alarm clock with you. Watching it is a feat of endurance.