The Lord of the Rings Movies Are So Damn Frustrating

December 4, 2014

I am watching The Lord of the Rings movies again.  And I am pissed off about it…again.  I hate watching this trilogy.

I get the same feeling when I watch Star Wars Episodes I, II, and III.  I am just pissed.  And confused.

How could they take something so rich and beautiful and make it so simple and stupid.

Peter Jackson treats his audience like a bunch of idiots, jumping from one extreme to the next, ignoring important plot points from the book and creating new plot points of his own imagination.

He takes rather minor etchings from the book and turns them into plot points.  Just painful…

Maybe if it wasn’t a book first.  Maybe if I only read it once instead of 6 times.  Maybe if Peter Jackson was more capable of creating human characters.  Maybe maybe maybe.

I put him in a class, sadly, with today’s George Lucas.  But at least Lucas made 4 good films (Star Wars IV-VI and American Graffiti).  Like in Lucas’ Episodes I-III, Jackson is incapable of creating nuance in his LOTR characters.  They are 1-dimensional heroes and cowards and villains.  Like Lucas, he relies more on exposition than on emotion.

Yet here I am watching it again.  Hoping to see some unseen brilliance that I missed the first few times.  But always coming up disappointed.