Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. Peter Jackson. 2002. ⚃

Oops. 2002 called and wants their CGI back. I guess it’s more disturbing in a movie like this where there are so mane gorgeous actual shots of things, and then there’s… this…

Anyway! I’m excited to start on the next Lord of the Rings movie. I don’t really remember what this one is all about… I did remember much of the first movie, and I remember the ending of the last movie, but I have no idea what’s happening in this one.

I think Toklien was kinda against the industrial revolution?

Eeeeevil!!!

Oh yeah! This is the movie with the ents! So it’s the big fight against Saruman!

It’s all side quests this movie, I think.

Nice forest.

Jackson is upping the comedy routines in this movie, because there’s… really not much happening.

I mean, there’s a lot of stuff happening, but it doesn’t really seem to be … pertinent?

It’s a good strategy, because this is very entertaining. As a movie, it makes no sense, but it’s fun to watch.

Ouch. That CGI.

There really isn’t much going on in this movie. I admire Jackson for committing fully to filming four hours of filler scenes (I’m guessing) in a quite stylish way, but I’m kinda bored now, and I wasn’t bored at all during the first movie.

I hope something of significance is gonna happen sometime soon.

An, no, nothing of significance happens.

I had a peek at imdb. The first movie has an 8.8 rating (fair), and this one has an … 8.7 rating. People are insane!

I mean, it’s just… who cares about these horsey people? For hours and hours?

Such blue.

I feel that we’re not really getting much from the orc side of things. What’s the orc motivation for going to war? Do they want more meat in their diet? Is there an ocrmaiden at home they’re fighting for? What are their opinions on Emacs key bindings?

Well, that was disappointing. The first movie was fabulous, but this… wasn’t.

Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring. Peter Jackson. 2001. ⚅

I had forgotten that this movie starts with a recap of The Hobbit. Sort of.

Anyway, I’ve bought the 4K Extended box set, and I’m gonna watch all three movies in one day! Haha! If I don’t fall asleep, but I remember these movies being quite spiffy? I haven’t seen the extended versions before, and I probably saw them on DVD originally, so I’ve seen only a couple percentages of these movies. Pixel wise.

Speaking of which, each movie comes on two 4K discs, so each movie is 150GB big! The bitrate peaks at >105Mbps! Looks great! My TV machine has a load of 4.5, but there’s no choppiness, so it’s just fast enough to play this movie.

But kinda overly colour-corrected?

I’m really into this. It’s like exciting and stuff — even if it’s slow. Or perhaps because it’s this slow?

One thing Jackson totally has going for him is using the environment in this way. Most US fantasy movies look like they’ve been shot just outside of Vancouver (because they have been), or if made in the past couple of years, on a green screen sound stage. Sure, there’s lots of composite shots here, but this would have been a very different movie if the surroundings didn’t look this gorgeous.

I mean…

One does not…

OK, not all the compositing is flawless — that does indeed look like four hobbitses greenscreened unto some footage.

I’ve heard that there’s gonna be a new 4K edition later this year — where they’ve fixed the colour grading. Because whoever did this edition went overboard with having every other scene in basically one colour. And it shifts weirdly between this reddish colour and a very cold blueish colour.

But I’m really enjoying this movie anyway!

OK, that’s shockingly bad greenscreening.

I’m shocked at how good this is. I laughed, I cried, I smiled almost constantly, I wasn’t bored a millisecond… The mix of deadly, mawkish earnestness and humour really shouldn’t work. But it does.

I’m not sure what parts were added for this extended edition? Because nothing seems padded: It’s not often you watch a movie that’s almost four hours long and think “that was just the right length”? This really shouldn’t be called “extended edition” — the other version should be “the short version”.

But it seems like the quest is already over after this epic! But there’s two more movies? How!

Resident Evil: The Final Chapter. Paul W.S. Anderson. 2016. ⚀

Yup. As usual in the Resident Evil movies, the cliffhanger from the previous movie is basically… just ignored?

And Anderson has adjusted to the times: The action scenes that used to be fun to watch are now basically just millisecond-cut montages of total confusion.

I’m guessing that’s just to cover a lower-than-usual budget: If you can’t actually see what’s on the screen, you don’t have to use as much money on it. Let’s see…

Here’s the 2012 movie:

And here’s this movie:

Wow. A much smaller budget, and a much higher cum gross.

That’ll learn em.

This movie is kinda painful to watch:

It gave me motion sickness 20 minutes into the movie. Every action sequence has 3-4-5 cuts every other second The camera is shaking even when all the characters are static.

I find myself looking away from the screen all the time — the editing and shakycam is indeed sickening.

Well, that wasn’t so bad…

Oh god. It’s not enough with the zombie drama? You gotta gin up this sort of fake drama, too?

I wonder whether Anderson was told to make it young and happening, and this is what he came up with? I mean, it was successful — you can’t argue with that cum gross on that budget. Perhaps the next movie will be all people standing around shouting at each other for two hours?

Saves money on zombie makeup.

This is really bad. I would normally ditch a movie this awful, but I’m morbidly curious as to how they’re going to end this. One thing’s for sure — this isn’t the final chapter of anything, but the endings of these movies are sometimes amusing. Even if the next movie completely ignores it, and I think they all did?