Tasmania

Rating: Null/10 (3 June 2004)

To be honest, this is less a review than a complaint about film sound and the dynamic range of modern movies. Alright, I have hearing problems, but I can watch a movie made before about 2000, usually without too much trouble. However the increasing obsession with soundtracks which swing between whispered dialog and thunderous sound effects is driving me to distraction. After about an hour of straining to hear about one word in ten of the dialog, and replaying sections to try to make them out - only to recoil from the set when the volume jumps 30db when someone closes a door or drops something in a pond - I just gave up and rewound the damn thing. And this is just with the VHS version. God knows what the dynamic range on the DVD is like. My parents have the same problem with most new films.
Please, film people, try to grasp this basic fact: unless the scene is taking place in a hurricane, the wind should not be louder than the actor's voice. And lip-reading won't even work. Have you tried to lip read Gollum?
Ok, I will include something by way of review, and since I never reviewed part two of the trilogy, I'll let this count for the whole epic.
I did watch parts one and two all the way through, and at least _some_ of part three, and the more I saw of it, the more I wanted to go out, scruff all the LOTR fans by the neck and tell them to just READ THE DAMN BOOK.
I am not some sort of Tolkien purist. I haven't even read the book myself in about 20 years, but I do have images graven in my memory from when I did. Furthermore, they are MY images, conjured by a combination of Tolkien's imagination and my own. LOTR is a superb fantasy epic, and deserves to be read, so that it might spark images in your mind which belong to you. As it is, we have a generation of people wandering around with Peter Jackson's images of LOTR in their heads. This is true of any adaptation of course, but with something as intensely fantastical and visual as LOTR, I think that people who have read, loved and internalised the book would do well to steer clear of the movies.
I might just read the book again instead. At least all the words are the same height.