[Thinlómien]

I seem to be making this the unofficial re-watching experience thread...

I rewatched the movies yet again during the holidays. It's funny, I remember that last time I saw them I liked them better than I used to, and now I'm back to sort of disliking them.

It seems like Jackson has lost all of Tolkien's subtlety and wisdom and turned it into a cheesy blockbuster. There are good moments and good portrayals - Sean Bean's Boromir is brilliant - but all in all the movies really lack too much of what makes LotR LotR.

Sometimes the movies are just really badly made. Viggo Mortensen does decent job as Aragorn (you would not have heard me saying this two years ago) but the script really kills all his effort. I don't know why they had to make him such an idiot. Look at any scene where there's Aragorn and Boromir (except B's death) and you see how totally unfriendlily he treats him and how completely devoid he's of social intelligence. (The crudest example is their first meeting in Rivendell where Boromir tries to talk and call Aragorn a friend but he just reads his book and says maybe one sentence in a self-important tone.)

Concerning Aragorn and Boromir though, I quite liked one thing. Watching FotR, it actually seems that the turning point for Aragorn is Boromir's death - it's then that he accepts who he is and what is his path. It actually works quite beautifully and surely gives even a new angle to look at the books.

And there, I think, lies the thing we all old complaining purist book fans actually owe to the movies. I dare claim I'm not the only one who has got new ideas about some things in the book because of how they've been interpreted in the movies. That surely is a valuable thing.