20 Years On, Lord Of The Rings Will Never Be Equalled

You know, being a kid growing up in the '90s was a bit of a strange experience now that I think about it, to paraphrase Tyler Duran, we were the middle children of history who

never

had anything unique and our own and that's why I think it means we lacked of a unifying cultural phenomenon that united our Collective Consciousness, the kind of iconic movie franchise or television show that anyone who grew up in that era could point to and say, look, that was my childhood, I mean, don't get it. I was wrong, there were a lot of old things to choose from, Indiana Jones Back to the Future, the Terminator and Aliens movies were amazing, but they all hit theaters long before my generation was old enough to see them, they were

never

really ours, not even the from Star Wars.

It passed us by because we grew up in that strange no man's land between the two big trilogies where not much was happening in a galaxy far, far away and so not many kids were interested in it. All of this is to say that growing up in the '90s felt a little like living off the slightly stale leftovers of someone else's cultural banquet. Yeah, it worked I guess, but it's not exactly good for your self-esteem, but that all started to change as the decade came to an end and we started. to hear rumors of a new fantasy trilogy in the works, a big-budget adaptation of The Lord of the Rings, no less, I can't begin to tell you now how excited this made the teenage Drinker feel because he had been a fan of books for

years

.

At that point I was already absolutely enamored with the world of Middle-earth and keep in mind that this was a very different and less cynical time when film adaptations of beloved properties weren't met with collective groans from the fanbase and questions about how bad they were. They were going to ruin it to cater to modern audiences, there was a real feeling of collective optimism that the time was right for anything to be possible, but even amidst all this optimism there were still doubts, after all, The Lord of the Rings was The most iconic fantasy story of all time, could Hollywood really do it justice?

Could they hope to recreate the epic scale and scope of Tolkin's world? Could the actors inhabit these larger-than-life characters and could it all be crafted by a New Zealand director best known for his low budget? Movies splatter like brain death, well, in December 2001 we found out and, about 5 minutes into The Fellowship of the Ring and that gloriously epic battle sequence against Sauron, I knew they had got it right, somehow they had found the pitch perfect. the perfect look, the perfect soundtrack and the perfect actors to make it all work and the more it progressed, the better each character became.

Arc, every big battle, iconic scene, and touching line of dialogue from the books was up to par. Faithfully recreated for all the world to see and two

years

later, when The Return of the King closed the epic story in the most satisfying way possible, I knew I had finally found what I had been searching for all my childhood, the phenomenon of culture pop that my This generation could make the At Last Call trilogy its own. I could point to it and say: look, I could have been a part of that, many others could have enjoyed it since, but in reality we were there when it happened and now we remember it all 20 years later, thinking about everything that came and went in those two decades , I was struck with a kind of sadness as I realized that The Lord of the Rings could very well have been the best we were ever going to achieve, the climax, the apex of pop culture.

Cinema is something that I don't think we

will

ever overcome. I mean, don't get me wrong, other franchises have made a lot more money than The Lord of the Rings. The individual films could have told their stories in a more intelligent and innovative way. and art forms Modern blockbusters, with the benefit of better technology, could have offered an even more impressive visual spectacle and other actors could have given subtler or more complex performances, but for me the Lord of the Rings trilogy represents the true climax of a big-budget Hollywood film. Making the perfect marriage between our artistic integrity and a crowd-pleasing show made it the right moment in our history when one didn't have to be sacrificed to serve the other, and I think it's interesting now to look back and see all the reasons why.

For starters, it was a great success. To start, there are the images. I mean, these movies have been rightly praised for their visual effects, which still hold up pretty well against the best Hollywood can produce today, which really makes you think about how little progress this is. The industry was actually made in the last two decades, but now it's easy to forget how many of them were filmed in real locations using practical effects, how many towering cities and castles were actually just intricately constructed miniatures enhanced by CGI and that's the key to remember here. Enhanced CGI definitely has its place in filmmaking, but it's supposed to be used to enhance rather than replace real locations;

It should be used to do things that are impossible for practical purposes, not as a lazy crutch to avoid having to leave that beautiful place. air-conditioned sound stage and maybe getting your hands dirty from time to time watching actors walking through real fields with real wind in their hair or walking on real mountain tops or sailing down real rivers is infinitely more attractive than any number of superficially impressive volume screen because knowing that they're actually there doing these things makes the world they inhabit feel like a real place rather than a video game scene and even all the risks and problems they encountered along the way somehow contribute to everything when vgo mortensson knocked out a tooth after taking a sword to the face or broke his toe on that epic punt helmet or sha Aston took a piece of glass on the foot or Orlando Bloom broke a rib falling from their horse is a sign of the dedication and occasional risks they had to take to do this and again is a sign of the very different times we live in today;

There seems to be this strange aversion to any kind of physical difficulty, discomfort or risk taken not only in film projects but in life in general and it's very depressing because you can see the obvious results of this in the type of people it creates and if you need a For example, just check out the Rings of Power cast interviews where everyone involved is. so young, fluffy, diverse and artificially happy that it reminds me more of an HR commercial than a serious viewing of a historical film. Project, they are all so blandly pleasant, so non-confrontational and careful not to say anything offensive that, as Echo Chamberlain once said, they are if not completely then at least the kind of adjacent people who have never had anything more dangerous than a pair of safety scissors and probably needed therapy afterwards and if you pay attention to what they actually talk about, they seem much more interested in arguing. how innovatively diverse they are or the activism that is apparently so close to their hearts that they barely have time to talk about the characters they play or the experiences they've had.

Hollywood used to represent heroic actions, now they can only see heroic identities that they used to represent. a Defend escapism and ask now what allegory is included in the agendas. Compare this to cast interviews or behind-the-scenes footage from the original Lord of the Rings and you really get a sense of how focused and dedicated everyone was to getting this right almost to the end. to the exclusion of everything else, whether it's the Costume Department diligently gathering hundreds of chainmail suits of armor on hand or Vgo Mortenson carrying his sword everywhere he goes, even when he's not shooting, or Ian McKellen having a copy of The Lord of the Rings.

With him on set as a reference there is a real sense of respect, professionalism and camaraderie, these guys really seem to want to do symbolic work with Justice, even if the process was long, exhausting and physically demanding, today's actors, writers and showrunners They seem to actively despise everything he was and everything he stood for and certainly don't seem interested in doing the work necessary to properly represent him on screen. When I see characters like Aragorn, Boromir or Aamir charging at Batel, I really believe what I'm seeing because the actors actually look like they could do this, they have gone through many hardships and physical challenges along the way and it has transformed them into men. who can believably play heroic characters like this and I say men specifically because well, this really is a story about male bravery. and heroism, two things that modern Hollywood seems to be allergic to now, The Lord of the Rings trilogy was never afraid to depict men as brave warriors, wise leaders, cunning strategists, and noble protectors because guess what those are? roles they played throughout human history. often without much thanks or recognition because that's what they were expected to do.

Tolken understood this. Peter Jackson understood this and so does everyone else with more functional brain cells than a jellyfish. Unfortunately, today's Hollywood writers don't fall into any of those categories. Every potential moment of male heroism or self-sacrifice in modern storytelling has to be undercut by some piece of shitty meta humor or a strong, diverse woman solving the problem on her own and the results are so predictable and depressing, no one believes it. . this because it goes against everything we know to be true and yet they are stubbornly trying to sell it to us year after year, still trying to push the message and that b

rings

me to the oft repeated interview with Peter Jackson, which illustrates perfectly by These movies were very successful 20 years ago, while almost everything else released by Hollywood in recent years is on a downward spiral towards Oblivion.

We didn't want to put in anything of our own, certainly in terms of the thematic material we didn't want. Putting our own baggage I mean, we had no interest in putting our messages in this movie, but we thought we should honor Tolen by putting his messages in it. This is why The Lord of the Rings got it. This is why people still talk. about these movies two decades later, that's why they

will

be loved by generation after generation and that's why I don't think we'll ever see movies like The Lord of the Rings again, because of the conditions that allowed those movies.

They just don't exist and I don't imagine they're coming back anytime soon Hollywood is a very different place now the writers and actors are very different people the whole culture of storytelling is different, but you know What's not different, the audience is still the same hunger for escapism for new worlds where adventure and wonder are everywhere. There is still the same desire for heroic characters fighting evil enemies. Stories of friendship, sacrifice and bravery that are untainted by tedious modern politics. Agendas remain the same need for stories that uplift our spirits that inspire us to be better at seeing beyond the trivial problems and drudgery of everyday life, which probably explains why they appear as

rings

of power that unfold.

They try so painfully to bend the world of Token and the character around modern sensibilities have already been forgotten before they've even finished the run and you know, I'm okay with all of this because the story that really mattered has already been told and told very well, now it is out there and it belongs to her. all of us and no matter how much modern writers try to warp it, twist it or reshape it to their own vision of what we should want, it can never be removed because some things really do stand the test of time anyway, that's all I've got .

I have for today go now