too much of a "good" thing

Rating: 5/10 (13 February 2004)

I have to say, up front, that I really liked Fellowship of the Ring a lot. But that movie was three hours long, as is Two Towers. Return of the King is three and a half hours. I understand Peter Jackson considers this to be "one" movie broken up into three parts -- that is, one nine and a half (or eleven, with the extended "special" editions) hour movie. That is simply excessive, IMHO. Anytime a movie goes much over two hours it better be for a very, very good reason. When you start talking about a three hour sequel to a three hour original movie, you've got problems -- I don't care how good the original was. Maybe Godfathers 1 and 2 are the exception. But FOTR and TTT are not that good.
FOTR had a more captivating story line. It was about a small band of brothers on a difficult and daring quest -- to destroy the dangerous ring of power. TTT doesn't have as good of a story line. There is a fundamental problem from the start. It makes no sense that Frodo and Sam would be left to go to Mordor on their own. Why would all three of the fellowship's best warriors -- Aragon, Legolas, and Gimli -- go off to save Pippin and Merry, and not one of them stay with Frodo and Sam? This makes NO SENSE, and the fact that Tolkien wrote it that way is no excuse. Isn't the destruction of the ring more important, in the scheme of things, than saving Merry and Pippin? Why not send at least Aragorn with Frodo and Sam -- or send Aragorn alone after Merry and Pippin and send Legolas and Gimli with Frodo and Sam? What on earth were Frodo and Sam supposed to do when they got to Mordor on their own?
Where FOTR was a story about a quest, a mission, TTT quickly becomes a tiresome story about a "war" between "good" and "evil." There are so many endless, repetitious, humorless pronouncements in this movie about the stakes of this battle that the theme gets very old very quickly. If I had been the editor I would have excised every line by Theoden, Aragorn, Treebeard, Sam, et al. about all that nonsense, cut the movie down to two hours and made it almost pure action.
The forces of Saruman are presented as so relentlessly, unmitigatingly evil that they are hard to hate. The orcs (or uruk-hai, I assume that's the same thing) are slimy creatures like Jim Cameron's Aliens. They ride CG beasts that look like dinos from Jurassic Park. Sauron is some weird flaming eye on top of a black tower. The only human villain is Saruman himself, who has about two lines in the whole three-hour flick. I don't need a lot of motivation for the villains, but I'd like to get at least some idea of why they act as they do. Why do they fight? Why are they so evil? What's the point? Meanwhile, the good guys are all white, the men do all the fighting -- in fact boys of as young as ten or eleven are thrown into battle but not a single woman is. It's just a tiresome, cliched battle of "good" against a straw man "evil." Why are the good guys so humorlessly good while the bad guys are so insanely, relentlessly evil?
I was led to believe that Smeagol/Gollum was the best CG character ever, but in fact he seemed less realistic than Jar Jar Binks and no improvement over the dinos from Jurassic Park. The only bright spot in the movie was Miranda Otto. I felt no tension in wondering whether Aragorn will choose her or Liv Tyler -- I assume he will choose Tyler, and think he is crazy for doing so.
Oh, I forgot one other human bad guy -- this "Wormtongue" fellow. How hard is it to figure out a guy named "Wormtongue" is up to no good? That's as bad of a name as "Darth Sidious."